


Caesar of the Stars

by RichardTGreen



Series: CAESAR OF THE STARS [1]
Category: Star Trek: The Original Series
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-09
Updated: 2020-06-09
Packaged: 2021-03-04 02:07:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 22
Words: 82,612
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24625972
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RichardTGreen/pseuds/RichardTGreen
Summary: "Caesar of the Stars" is the first part of a new trilogy from the author of "Vina Escaped" (on www.fanfiction.net).Does anyone really believe James T. Kirk only fathered one child?  And what would it mean, if they were on worlds that still resisted joining the Federation?  He could get permission to go back and try again...(Also, Star Trek is now a great, sprawling saga, of course.  And perhaps inevitably I have made a mistake, by including Captain Sulu's daughter Demora in these new tales, which are set in the final few years of James T. Kirk's life.  But I needed more women, and more multi-cultural characters.  And fear not!  In the grand tradition of serialized fiction, it is my intent to bonk her--and Captain Kirk-- on the head, near the very end, in 2293, so they suddenly have amnesia, and utterly forget they've met, when they meet--again-- at the christening of the Enterprise "B.")RTG
Series: CAESAR OF THE STARS [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1780471
Kudos: 3





	1. CAESAR OF THE STARS

Also by Richard T. Green  
“The Coils of Orion”  
“Vina Escaped”  
“Vina Escaped II: Green Blood, Red Blood”  
(FanFiction.net)

“Zombie Hollywood”  
(fiction.net)

AUTHOR’S NOTE

“What would you do if you had absolute freedom?” A little voice inside me asked, in the last warm days of 2019. 

“I’d write another Star Trek novel” I smiled, for nothing could be more fun, to me anyway. I had been thinking of it for years, after the first three I posted on www.fanfiction.net One of those novels was good enough to be plagiarized! Imagine my feeling of accomplishment.

This time would be different, though. After a lifetime of crushing anxiety, which I inherited from my father, I began taking mineral supplements, magnesium tablets. And all the anxiety miraculously went away, thanks to simple chemistry. This new book turned out to be more spontaneous, and a lot more fun as a result. But please don’t plagiarize it.

There are a few painful moments, too, in Caesar of the Stars. And, for some reason, the modern convention is to alert you to the fact that there are eight or ten blunt curse words scattered through the story, spoken mostly by very frustrated young people, working their ways through impossible situations. And one bawdy joke I couldn’t quite give up, after the second “I’m a doctor not a (fill in the blank)” moment. And I didn’t have a professional editor, so you might hit a pothole, though I’ve really combed through it. Don’t get mad (or superior, which is also a modern convention). Ye gods, would the 1960’s even recognize us any more? 

Thank you for your kind offers to edit my work in the past. I’m just a little too stubborn and possessive to take them up. Writing alone, as a theater critic for nearly twenty years, and a journalist in the 1980’s, has helped to hone my work. The mineral supplements did the rest. (I have a wonderful editor at www.talkinbroadway.com, but she mostly corrects me on theater history.)

The setting of this book is around the Earth year 2291; or between the movies “The Undiscovered Country,” and the opening minutes of “Generations,” as you and I would say. 

Anyway, if you’ve been feeling trapped and anxious during the pandemic, I hope this gives you back your sense of absolute freedom, all over again.

Rich  
St. Louis, Missouri

FORWARD 

“Of course it’s a trap. Everything’s a trap.” 

Admiral Komak snarled the words, half a galaxy away, on the screen of James T. Kirk’s home computer. Komak, at least 120 years old now, floated in zero-g, and was bathed in a locus of heat-lamps, seemingly trapped himself inside the warm glow of them. After many years of service, he had retired on a distant starbase. It reminded Kirk of General Sternwood, in Raymond Chandler’s “The Big Sleep”: an old man bundled up in blankets, in a tropical greenhouse; kept alive like a rare orchid.

“Then why do you think they’re letting me go?”

“Another try, they want another try,” Komak snarled, as if Kirk were still a dimwitted 33 year old starship captain, and not worth any more of the admiral’s last days. Kirk himself had also been an admiral, but was back on the Enterprise again. Though probably near the end of his own career, after a peace conference that ended in assassination over Camp Khitomer.

“Another try,” Kirk repeated, as if it hadn’t just been said, and twice. 

“They want those planets in the Federation. It looks bad if they’re not,” Komak speculated, somewhat more quietly now, but without softening. Maybe five percent less irascible.

“But I’m the fellow who couldn’t get them in, twenty years ago. And now they want me to… fail again.” He’d miraculously been granted his wish, and it filled him with suspicion.

“Don’t be an idiot, they don’t care about you. They just care about the planets.”

Kirk shrugged. He had asked to go, he had a sentimental urge to revisit some of his old flames, some of his old loves, as a younger man, on his first five year mission as captain of the USS Enterprise. He didn’t express it that way, of course, in his official proposition to Starfleet Command. He had quite diplomatically requested the Enterprise embark on a return visit to stubbornly independent worlds, “in order to reassert the good will of the Federation, and to work toward the remittance of any past contamination.” Privately he called it his “forgiveness tour.” But, just as surely, Starfleet had taken the bait, to let him go back. Had they seen through to his personal motives, or just taken them for granted? He already felt remorse.

Then, floating there in his navy blue Starfleet jumpsuit, with the faintest gold woven into the cuffs and collar, Komak’s mood changed. He seemed as though he was talking to a friend, perhaps even an equal. Or maybe he’d just forgotten to whom he was talking.

“Back in the old days,” the dodecacentenarian said quietly, “if I’d had a cadet, or an ensign, who was just absolutely petrified over something, I’d sort of… make up a little story. You know, to encourage them, to make them laugh. I don’t know.”

Kirk leaned in. He didn’t know if he was petrified, or afraid of what he’d find, from twenty years past. The last time, he found and lost a son, and lost and found the Enterprise. As if telling a bedtime story, Komak came closer to his own transmitting screen, and spoke almost gently.

“There is a theory, rarely mentioned by sane beings,” Komak intoned, “that one person in any crowd, in any collection of people, might secretly be a time-traveler… sent back from (let us say) 10,000 years in the future (or a million years, it doesn’t matter). The concept goes further toward crazy when you’re told their sole purpose in traveling back to today is to observe you: James T. Kirk, Cadet Kirk. In the final moments before you unexpectedly attain your grand purpose in life. In the history of all things, as one of those incredible persons who changed the course of the galaxy. Presumably for good. And that’s why you’ve got to make a choice now, that will last 10,000 years.” 

“And that would gave them courage,” Kirk sighed.

“Well, no. But it usually made them laugh.”

And, ten days later, in the old Earth year of 2291, Komak’s mad theory dissolved along with Captain Kirk, as he stood in the high energy beam of the transporter room, on board the USS Enterprise: to visit a planet he’d been to over twenty years earlier, in answer of a distress call. 

“CAESAR OF THE STARS”

By Richard T. Green

The theory reformed itself once again in Kirk’s brain, along with his body, as it cooled in an instant down on the surface on Scalos. It was a world he could not save a generation ago, once ruled by Deela: a woman he’d only briefly known. 

“Verify tricorders on ultra-high speed monitoring,” Kirk said quietly, not trusting the vast isolation around him and his crewmen. It was a scene of ruin and chaos.

One by one, the security team acknowledged their settings, and the group walked forward behind Kirk.

“I can’t figure out if we’re coming back to Scalos from the future, or the past,” Doctor McCoy muttered, as if he’d been reading Kirk’s mind, or remembering the same time-traveler story, as the landing party surveyed the strange world. “They lived their lives so fast here, if they survived at all. They must be far out into their own future by now. Which puts us in their distant past. Either that, or…” 

He left the sentence unfinished. For one thing, it was a bit perplexing. For another, if things had not worked out at all, the landing party would be returning from their own future, to someone else’s long-dead past. 

“It costs nothing to hope, Bones,” was all Kirk would say in reply, as if he weren’t already gazing across a despairing landscape. A tremendous ruin of a castle, or fallen city, stood a few hundred meters ahead, resembling a collection of old-fashioned hypodermic syringes and needles, pointing upwards, once bleached white, now like the remains of a blackened bonfire. The tricorders whirred away, a little more furiously than usual. Kirk estimated the tallest nightmare structure to be about seventy stories high, and wide at the base, tapering upward to a single tower that tilted above the rest: as if it had all collapsed from within, and the other spires pointed in blamefully toward the center.

“You may have picked the wrong planet, Jim,” the ship’s chief medical officer insisted, as the group of six from the Enterprise made their way across the wasteland, thickly scattered with hand-sized rocks that seemed to have blasted out of a volcano, in the last decade or so, as far as their sensors could tell from orbit. 

“It wasn’t this way when we first came,” Kirk agreed. He had this lingering sense of unfinished business, and the the memory of Deela, beautiful and doomed, and perhaps a bit duplicitous, bidding him a thwarted farewell. She had existed in her own ultra-fast-motion life, too fast for outsiders to see, but needed a steady supply of off-world men to repopulate her world. It basically didn’t work out.

He tried to imagine some good coming out of all this. There wasn’t much planet left to join this Federation, or any other.

“Maybe to them, it’s beautiful, and not… horrible,” Lt. Haines said, marching awkwardly on Kirk’s other side. The security chief was picking her way across the dusty rocks, somehow managing to seem artful and proud as she went. The black phaser belt around her red tunic undulated as she walked, and her eyes scanned the horizon for something less bleak than what lay ahead. “Maybe to them… it’s hopeful,” she added, though she seemed unconvinced.

“Maybe ‘horrible’ in a magnificent kind of way, Chief Haines,” the ship’s engineer, Montgomery Scott teased. 

“‘Maybe’ and ‘kind of’ being the operative words,” McCoy replied, his pale blue eyes searching for any sign of ‘magnificence.’

“It’s all in the eye of the beholder, Doctor McCoy,” the engineer added. Two other two young male security officers walked on either side of Scotty, as if they might lend a hand, should he trip over a rock. In their red tunics, the landing party passed as shadows in the dark orange landscape stretching in all directions. It was like walking into Hell without a passport. And it crossed Kirk’s mind that there might be some confusion in just getting out again.

Beyond the apparent volcanic devastation, they also knew from their approach scans that a black and teal ocean whispered past the great structure up ahead. But those crashing waves, which they could hear roaring this way and that, sang of a restless dread. 

The blackened, shriveled city was finally all around them, and they were surprised to get metabolic readings inside. For another half hour of climbing and clambering, they witnessed the tragedy of a Federation quarantine: emptiness and abandonment and a strange smell of chemical compounds even their tricorders could not fully identify. Finally they came to a long, elegant throne room, with a caved-in section near the far end. One of the other nearby towers had collapsed there, bringing down about a fifth of the chamber. And a cloud of orange dust from the wasteland had spread inside, rendering ghostly the tile patterns on the floor.

Immediately, Kirk could recognize her on a turquoise colored velvet throne, below a silvery sundial, whose measuring blades had fallen off, its hours now meaningless.

“Greetings, Captain Kirk,” a warm, familiar voice called to him, across the distance, as they approached. Silver chairs and benches were lined up along the walls, under dark veined mirrors, and a ceiling of frenetic geometric designs, nearly matching the floor, like a museum in need of dusting. 

“Or, should I say ‘Admiral’ Kirk,” Deela smiled, rising from her seat of state, and extending a long, elegant arm to him.

“No. It was ‘admiral,’ but that’s another story. Just… ‘Captain’ Kirk. Again.”

“All over again,” Deela smiled, playfully. But if he’d been embarrassed by her romantic single-mindedness, he didn’t show it. And Kirk’s older friends in the landing party were used to it.

He was close enough to take her hand, and could see some vaguely familiar guardsmen in the alcove nearest to her, in their clear uniforms, with wide silver lamé bars throughout, and woven silver collars, like slaves. 

“How can we ‘see’ you,” he said, appreciating her eternal beauty.

“An after-effect of the ‘cryogenic sleeping apparatus’,” she said, coyly, trying to remember the exact technical terms. “They say it should go away soon. And then I’ll just be a very familiar buzzing in your ear, as before,” she smiled sadly.

“You put yourselves into the same deep freeze that you tried to use on us,” McCoy said, accusingly— snapping Kirk out of an intimate moment. Back in those days, it almost seemed like someone was trying to kill or enslave them all on a weekly basis.

“Yes, Doctor, we had no choice. We knew we were doomed under the quarantine, and so… we put ourselves into a long period of hibernation. It seemed our only path to any kind of a future. Till you put away your wrath,” the leader of her race declaimed softly, but firmly. Every statement she made seemed like a declaration of state, like a knighting, or beheading: the royal tone descending in pitch, to an irrevocable stop.

“That’s definitely some kind of a future,” Scotty murmured to McCoy, as quietly as he could.

“Our cryo-suspension chambers saved us, when the volcano erupted. And then our automated sensors picked up your ship’s arrival a short time ago, and we were awakened.” She fairly laughed now: “You should have seen us when we first woke up! We were like trees, practically motionless!” 

But then her tone became elegant and mournful again.

“Slowly we will return to our own higher level,” she said clearly and distinctly, as if she were trying, already, not to become a blur for their sake. Then she laughed, amused by the idea that she would rocket past them, like some amphibian, hurrying past the lichen on the shore.

“In the meantime,” she turned more brightly to her left, and raised a hand, as she resumed her throne, “may we present… our daughter.” Her use of the “royal we,” in this instance, seemed only slightly confusing.

A girl, looking younger than he expected, seeming only fourteen or fifteen, emerged from behind a series of nets and veils in an alcove. Her hair was red, and her skin very pale. As she approached, he could see she had hazel-colored eyes. But, like his own, they were subject to change, seeming very green when she stepped into the natural light from the collapsed roof, to stand near Deela: the queen in silver; the princess in gauzy fabric of familiar greenish gold, chosen to match his old tunic from 20 years ago. This is how peaceful planets convey alliances of marriage and birth and lineage to one another: in this case, through the whispering celadon mesh that wrapped around, and trailed behind her.

He took her hand as though it was the most natural thing in the world, and nodded, “Your grace.” She curtsied prettily, but without a smile. It seemed, in fact, as though she were both perturbed and astonished to find herself in such a spot. Though any fourteen year old might react just the same, at any point in their day. She had to be twenty-one-ish, he insisted to himself. Because she had to be his daughter. But she didn’t belong to either one of them.

“It is our desire,” Deela said, from her seat, interrupting Kirk’s gaze, “that Sona should become acquainted with… you, Captain Kirk,” she said, as if the decision were made at random.

The immediate response would be “no,” of course, that any Scalosians represented a threat on board the Enterprise at any time, on any plane of existence. But the present mission seemed intended to repair any trace of damage done by the captain, in his young romantic exploits. And so their options had changed. This would be a mission neither scientific nor military in scope, but potentially just as dangerous: to be purely political, as at Camp Khitomer. 

Unheard by the senior officers, one of the young security men at the rear of the group regarded the Scalosian ruler’s serious expression, and whispered to his crewmate, “they used to call that ‘resting bitch face.’” 

Immediately, Lt. Haines snuffed-out their snickering, quietly but evenly turning to face the young men: “And now we call it ‘command face, ensign.’”

In short order, a silvery cryo-suit was brought out by those elusive attendants, and Sona had stripped herself bare, without a trace of self-consciousness. She was inserted, like some fine crystal stemware, into the form-fitting, metallic fatigue, with hoses up and down. After much dutiful silence on her part, and a bit of personal rearrangement inside, the suit was zipped up. A thin ring of metal tubing, with little nozzles all around, was added to encircle the base of her neck. When it was turned on, Sona’s pale face was nearly lost behind a burst of blue mist, that turned all but the top of her red hair a faint shade of orange, from the cold preserving gasses.

“This will keep her suppressed down to your level of activity, so that you may… get to know one another,” Deela said, seeming pleased as she stood up, to bid farewell to her daughter. The smiling, glamorous mother pulled the neck of her daughter’s suit farther up, inside the metal tubular ring, so the fabric covered all the way up to Sona’s jaw. “You must keep this suit on at all times, Sona, do you understand?” 

There was no malice in Deela’s tone, but it was already clear there was something dreadful about what the young girl was being asked to do, for only the vaguest of reasons.

“I do,” Sona said quietly, the first words she’d spoken in Kirk’s presence. It seemed like a miserable existence, but perhaps no worse than what the Scalosians had endured lately, or had tried to inflict upon the crew of the Enterprise.

Gradually the teenager seemed more natural, or at least less tentative, in the flexible silver suit. Covered from her neck down to her toes, she made a slight crinkling noise walking around. But after a few minutes, in which she seemed no more comfortable, Kirk wondered if she would ever really adapt to this ordeal. 

The blue mist rose continuously from the metallic ring resting on her collarbones, transfixing the landing party: as if her head and frosty hair were the only part of her that remained, floating space, behind an untouchable glory. The rest of her was shiny and robotic, hoses and cables running along the surface, and a little control pack on her right hip. It was as if her head were floating toward you, from some persistent dream, severed from its natural body by this vain attempt to unite two vastly different cultures.

And how must I look to her? Kirk wondered, glancing side-long, as they prepared to beam up to the ship. Just another hard-edged old man, unapproachable through her own frigid mist, appearing out of nowhere, to whom she was consigned for some unknown period of time, or purpose.

After they got back on board the Enterprise, he gave her the tour of the ship, remembering all over again how lucky he was to be commanding such a vessel, and getting her back after foolishly walking away, and having her blown to bits. And then re-built all over again. Would it be so easy with a daughter, from the wreckage of a dying world? Now and then he’d stop and introduce her— not as his daughter, specifically— but as a royal presence, a princess of Scalos. This produced no recognizable impact on any of the yeomen or ensigns roving the corridors. They were all too young to really know the whole story, or how space changes you, and becomes the equation of survival.

“You haven’t been in suspended animation all your life, have you?” Kirk asked, with the usual little smile. Obviously she’d been educated and taught a certain degree of comportment, or somehow just expressed it naturally.

“No,” Sona nodded. “The rest were left asleep, I was usually awake, to study and, you would say, ‘become myself.’”

“Well, I’m not sure we’d say that, but I gather your meaning,” Kirk chuckled. In his experience, the only way to become yourself was to be thrown kicking and screaming into the jaws of something that only wanted to consume you. And, theoretically, to emerge alive again, out the other end. How many times had he done that? He hadn’t changed that much, he insisted inside his own mind. But perhaps his story became his ‘self.’

“So it was just you, wandering the planet, all your life?”

“Yes, it was most interesting. Our knowledge bank served my… every need,” she said, as if she had to remind herself to complete her sentences aloud, for another living, breathing person in her world.

“I see,” Kirk said. “And of course at some point the volcano…” They nodded to another pair of crewmen walking past before she resumed.

“Yes, it was quite spectacular. I couldn’t clean it all up myself, and of course mother’s only just awakened for your arrival. From a scientific standpoint, it was quite… magnificent.”

“Of course. And the Federation might be able to help.”

He and Sona had gone through sickbay, and various other science labs, and data centers, and the main bridge, and the combat bridge, and phaser control. For some reason he couldn’t bring himself to take her through engineering, and especially not through life-support, the area where Deela’s lieutenants had sabotaged the ship during that first visit. Eventually they came to her guest quarters, in the midst of the longest curving corridor on deck five.

“What time would you like me to come take you to dinner,” he asked, at her cabin doorway.

“The cryo-suit has dampened my appetite, I’m afraid. Perhaps in the morning,” she said, her eyes wandering, before she turned away. The door between them closed with a whoosh!

Left to her own devices, Sona immediately disabled the cryo-suit, and very awkwardly slithered out, like a beautiful snake shedding its silvery skin.


	2. Chapter 2

“Isn’t twenty years’ quarantine… long enough?” Kirk asked, as the command officers sat around the long table in the ship’s deck three briefing room, discussing the fate of an entire planet and civilization.

“It’s not twenty years if you’ve been asleep the whole time!” Dr. McCoy replied immediately. “They’ve only cast themselves into a future where we’re more mature. Not them!”

“Maybe,” Mr. Scott leaned back, trying to lower the emotional pitch of the discussion, “we can take the chance to rebuild their world, and manufacture a new relationship.”

“Once they’re sped up again, to a thousand times our metabolic rate, we’ll still be totally unprepared,” the ship’s doctor said, glumly.

“Thus far,” Mr. Spock spoke at last, “our guest has yet to leave her cabin. At least so far as our life-form sensors can determine.”

“That is not entirely reassuring, Mr. Spock,” McCoy raised his voice. The elegance of their red tunics had not diminished the sparring across this length of table. The Vulcan science commander, like the rest of them, was trying to peer through the confusion of the moment, into a more orderly conclusion.

“Typically what we’d do,” Kirk sighed, “is try to find a ‘companion’ on board, to draw out a difficult visitor.” 

“You’re her father,” Scotty said, savoring the irony of the moment.

“And she’s a teenager,” Commander Uhura countered, shaking her head in amazement at the problem at hand, and the arbitrary, grand designs of the older men at the table. “Just like Charlie and the Thetans, or Miri and her friends: they’re half-children.” This was going far back into the history of the team. But she had clarified things, for better or worse. And, in the moment that followed, Uhura had to break her natural tendency to look away, the impulse to stare meekly into the computer panel at the far end of the table. Instead, she engaged each person around the room, with her gently warning eyes. For each one of them had learned something about command, from exposure to James T. Kirk.

“Even if she’s slowed down to our speed, her mind already works faster than an adult’s,” Uhura insisted, remembering her own teenaged years. “Maybe she hasn’t got the real-life experience. But it doesn’t mean she lacks a need for humanoid interaction. She’s been totally alone.”

“Agreed,” McCoy spoke again, after a moment. “Chapel can give her a medical exam, pretend to be aloof and dismissive of the girl at first, and then act all surprised and impressed or whatever, when Princess Sona says something half-way intelligent or insightful. Isn’t that the usual way of endearing yourself to a teenager?”

Uhura restrained a laugh, at the blithe, male callousness of that. But everyone else seemed distinctly un-amused by the potential for danger.

About an hour later, Security Chief Haines was walking into the officer’s mess, where at least a half dozen crewmen were crowded around a viewscreen against one wall.

“What is that?” she asked, standing behind the group. She figured it out, it was obvious from the orange landscape, and all the little rocks, that it was Scalos, as seen from above. And the horrible collapsed city state was being rebuilt at a blinding speed. 

Huge scaffolds blurred into existence over collapsed towers, and were removed one by one. Debris, and fallen walls, were cleaned and replaced, in a similarly dizzying manner. More scaffolding, and new towers began to rise. A huge concave dome appeared on one end of the dying and reforming metropolis, like a bowl, as they watched. It was easily a hundred meters across.

“What is that,” Haines said again, even more astonished, at the edge of the crowd watching. 

Commander Chekov, the ship’s helmsman, adopted an earnest manner, and turned from the screen with a worried sigh. “It’s for the death ray.”

“Oh,” Haines nodded, suddenly impressed, and not wanting to perpetuate the idea that a security officer might be stupid. “Well, you got to have a death ray, right? When somebody comes whipping out at you, from the eleventy-seventh dimension, out of some crazy new galaxy, falling out of some parallel universe, you know you’re gonna need a death ray.”

But just as quickly on the screen, another structure was blurred into the inside of the inverted dome, a collection of five minarets, that seemed not at all dangerous looking. Just whimsical towers, of varying heights, with an assortment of balconies. Blue Scalosian water pooled into the bowl, creating an alien sort of Venice.

“Yeah, well… call me when they finish that death ray,” she sighed, only mildly perturbed. She found a table of other security men off in a corner, watching the same video feed on another bulkhead. 

“Not so sure they need our help after all,” Haines said, as she sat down and eyed the breakfasts of the others around the table. She adjusted her tunic, looking out over their heads. “We’re like, ‘let us help you, let us be your friends, Prime Directive,’ and they’re like, ‘uh, no thanks, we were just trying to take a little nap is all. Here’s our princess! Take her on your ship! We won’t pull a fast one on you, we promise!’”

The security men laughed in spite of themselves, at the chance they were taking. 

“Yeah, you can laugh,” she resumed after a moment. “You guys are like, ‘what’s the worst that can happen to me? I have to spend the rest of my life inseminating alien princesses.’ Yeah. Didn’t Starfleet used to have that recruitment poster once, ‘See the Galaxy, Screw Alien Space Princesses from Outer Space’? That’s what you signed up for in the first place, right?”

“That was a good poster,” Haines mused. “I liked that poster.”

Up on the bridge, the mood was less jovial.

“How goes ‘bring your daughter to work day’?” McCoy asked Kirk, at the center seat. He didn’t even ask it quietly, it was just straight-up.

“If by that,” Kirk said, consciously adopting the construction of his Vulcan first officer, “you are referring to the next phase of Federation governance, and” (he paused to take a breath) “a heightened sense of responsibility toward potential member planets,” Kirk shrugged, having completely invalidated the premise of McCoy’s question…

“Yes, that’s what I was asking.”

“It’s going fine,” Kirk added, matching the doctor’s inquisitive glare.

“Good,” McCoy nodded, though he might have meant the opposite.

The whirring and chirping of familiar telemetry swirled around them, in the dozens of readouts on screens at every station on the bridge, and seven officers were monitoring panels and screens without seeming to overhear at all. A yeoman with a tablet got Kirk’s signature on a report, and withdrew into one of the turbolifts.

On the big screen ahead was the same view that everyone with a free moment was watching throughout the ship: the blinding pace of the rebuilding of Scalos. After a few minutes, it switched back to the orbiting view again, the planet and stars.

“Well, if nothing else, they don’t have an interstellar vessel,” McCoy nodded. 

And as if on-cue, Sona appeared through the turbo lift doors, in her cryo-suit again. Kirk gallantly rose to his feet to welcome her, though of course she’d been up there briefly the day before. He escorted her down to the lower helm circle, and resumed his captain’s seat. She stood opposite the doctor, without the slightest trace of friendliness or humility, it seemed.

“Spoke too soon,” McCoy muttered, about Scalos not having an interstellar vessel. He turned to lift, to go down to sickbay. Sona was, as now seemed her custom, lost and troubled behind a blue veil of icy fog, rising up from the ring.

“You have been to many worlds?” she asked, glancing at Kirk, and letting her eyes rove around the officers’ ring of blinking lights.

“Yes, it’s rare we get back to the same world twice.” He smiled, but it took her a moment to register his emotion, and mirror-back the same expression, friendly and surprised. For someone who’d been raised by computers while her own race slept, he supposed she was coming along reasonably well.

In a way, Sona might be the best emissary from Scalos, Kirk thought, watching her out of the corner of his eye. Isolated in her upbringing, she hadn’t been suffused with the faintly calculated air of her race, eager to capture any passing ship as an orbiting sperm bank, after the men of Scalos had been made sterile by the same conditions that elevated them all to invisible levels of activity. And he didn’t have the “guilt factor,” in that particular case, twenty years ago, of imposing his own lust on some backward planetary leader. Deela had seemed plenty eager to have had him. 

“But why did you come back,” Sona asked. It was a question he kept asking himself.

“We couldn’t leave you suffocated like that, under quarantine,” he nodded to the screen view of the planet below. But then he had to glance back at his daughter, only to be reminded that she seemed isolated still, walled-off by the blue fog, like some distant memorial to a ruined world.

“Then perhaps you have a solution in mind?”

“No, not really,” Kirk said, with his usual nonchalance.

“You are, perhaps, a race of controlled confrontation,” Sona nodded, as if she had read all about such things.

“Perhaps,” Kirk smiled.

“To magically reappear in our star system, to wake up the people who tried to enslave you, for what? More of the same?” Perhaps she had learned from all the other captured ships.

“You assume that nothing has changed,” Kirk said, swiveling his chair slightly in her direction. “There must be other men and women on Scalos, who had fathers brought in from other worlds, right?”

“Of course, how could it be otherwise?”

“Maybe you just need… imported water,” Jim Kirk said, without trying to be funny.

“You mean icebergs from space, sent crashing down into the post-volcanic desert?” She seemed mildly amused.

“Just a spur of the moment idea.” Another silence passed between them, filled by the music of 23rd century technology, the buzzing and tweeting all around, mixed with snippets of talk from all over the ship. “But the other races who fathered you, they must have added in some new blood, some new thinking, some new… dynamic.”

“I suppose they must. It’s just the nature of our world, we’re all half-breeds. Some are born to a joyful chaos, others to the madness of perfect order.”

“And which are you?”

“I was raised by the knowledge bank. ‘No matter how quickly you empty it, it fills back up again’,” she added, as if it were a jingle. The self-assurance of her steady childhood background seemed to relax her. To Kirk, Uhura’s comparison to Charlie and the Thetans seemed remarkably apt.

“This is your knowledge bank now,” Kirk said, gesturing toward the screen and the stars beyond Scalos. “This is what I want for you, to become a mirror to the Universe.”

She seemed startled by that, testing to see if he were joking, before a kind of awe-struck fear washed across her face. But he had not intended to overwhelm her.

“This is somewhat… too much for me,” she said after another moment. “May I see you again later?”

“Of course,” Kirk said, rising from the center-seat, and at least symbolically escorting her to the two steps up to the turbolift. It made his heart heavy, to see her lost in thought, and questioning everything at once. Then the lift doors whooshed shut, and she was gone.

Without speaking, Cmdr. Uhura approached now, from the communications station over his right shoulder. She produced a computer tablet, with a black graph on a yellow background. 

“I hope it’s not out of line, Captain,” Uhura began, “but I did something without asking, I took the liberty of recording your daughter’s vocal patterns for analysis.”

“What did you find?” He was more intrigued than surprised.

“These,” she said, scrolling her long red fingernail across the screen, starting and stopping at little interruptions here and there, like flattened crests in a wave pattern, in the otherwise sweeping nature of a humanoid voice.

“Changes in her vocal pattern,” Kirk surmised. Uhura was still deeply engrossed in the lines on the graph, as she spoke, summing them up.

“Yes sir. It’s almost as if she were calculating her rate of speech. As if she were already speeding up to her normal metabolic rate again, but trying to hide it. These little hiccups, or hesitation marks, may suggest that she’s trying to slow herself down periodically.”

By this time Mr. Spock had also stepped down, and stood listening. Kirk leaned in closer to the tablet, seeing regular, distinct jagged breath changes, and a slight flattening or sharpening of pitch and tone, on the graph.

“Then the cryo-suit…” he started.

“Is not performing as we expected,” Mr. Spock nodded, a bit dismally.

“Or she’s not… using it as expected.” Commander Uhura said, turning pointedly to Kirk, engaging in the process of controlled confrontation with one of her own kind.

“I would not presume to argue,” the Vulcan acknowledged. Both officers looked eager to let Kirk draw his own conclusions.

“Well, I mean,” Kirk philosophized, “you have to allow for the organic nature of her being.”

“And for the well-being of the ship,” Uhura said, meeting Kirk’s gaze head-on.

“What do you do when you are conflicted,” Sona asked Dr. Chapel, in sickbay, as they walked into the wardroom for an exam, a half an hour later.

“What do I do?” Christine laughed, for everyone had a different response to that. “I try to set down everything I’m thinking into words and text, and see if it’s all arranged sensibly, and if it’s what I believe. And then I take out everything that doesn’t fit with what I believe!”

“That sounds like a joke,” Sona grumbled. “You throw out whatever doesn’t agree with what you already know?”

“With what I already believe,” Dr. Chapel said, reassuringly.

“But what do I already believe,” Sona said, quietly.

“Well,” Chapel said, going through the exam as usual, arranging the patient on the exam bed and watching the big long screen overhead light up, with a transparent view of the girl’s body, beneath the wires and joints and electronics of her silvery life-support suit.

“I can’t explain it really, sometimes it’s just what feels true and right and correct. In medical school we’re taught to help others, and that’s what I believe in: if it’s not helping others, it’s probably not good, according to what I personally know.”

“Or believe,” Sona said, staring up at the curved corner of the sickbay, where the bulkhead met the upper deck. 

“Well, that’s where you run into the problem of knowledge and belief,” Chapel smiled, making a few notes on a tablet.

“What do you mean?”

“You can’t… have one without the other,” Dr. Christine Chapel sighed, as if it were the problem of the ages. “The known supports the unknown, the real supports the unreal, the concrete and undeniable is supported by the invisible, the imaginary, the… the structure of… what we used to call ‘the heart.’”

“I feel very stupid, for some reason,” Sona said, sounding impatient with herself. Her computer teacher had said nothing about the “heart,” a second heart, beyond the physical. It seemed quite metaphysical.

“Okay, we’re all done!” Chapel nodded, without intending to have delivered the younger woman to the point of utter philosophical desperation. She helped Sona off the bed, and asked her a few more questions about personal issues, and diet, and whether she was getting along all right. The concept that she was a free agent on this crowded ship, on her own recognizance, seemed a strange blow to a princess who had only ruled a sleeping world.

“But what happens when my knowns, and reals, and undeniables suddenly get changed around?”

“Ah,” Chapel smiled, much more delighted than she’d expected to be on that particular day. “That’s entirely up to you! Some people hang on to their old ‘unknowns’ for comfort, or peace of mind. Or, who knows, you might also find new depth in your old unknowns. But you’ll always have some arrangement of some kind of knowns and unknowns.”

Sona, it had become clear, had a tendency to not look at people directly. But now she was looking just slightly past the doctor, in the door to sickbay, with a humorous look in her eyes. She imagined that no one had ever seen that look before, on Scalos, or on board the Enterprise.

“Jim, I’ve got some news,” McCoy said quietly, on the bridge again, next to Kirk. “She’s speeding up.”

“We know, Bones.”

“You— well, maybe you’d like to tell me how, since her latest medical records only got merged into the system not ten minutes ago!” A professional sense of outrage steamed off of him, like an invisible veil. Had they gone poking around in someone’s private medical files?

“Commander Uhura found our guest’s vocal pattern shows she is… attempting to speak in a normal conversational cadence, Doctor,” Mr. Spock said, from the science station.

“You’ll have to excuse me, Mr. Spock,” McCoy swiveled his head like a Denebian tree cobra, “I’m a doctor not a—“ though he seemed at a loss, for just an instant, as to what exactly he was not.

“A communications specialist?” Uhura suggested, exchanging a smile with James T. Kirk.

“Exactly!” the doctor said, somehow mollified. At least, in this case, he wasn’t being shown-up by a walking circuit board.


	3. Chapter 3

That night, she watched her father sleep. It seemed like many hours, after she’d slipped into his quarters along with him at the end of a long day, unseen, at her normal metabolic rate. At a glacial speed, he tossed his red tunic over the back of a chair, and pulled off his boots. Then he wrote for the longest time, on the screen of a handheld, staring off into space again and again. To have one’s deepest thoughts and feelings shared downstream, like life-giving waters, would be wonderful.

But to live in such a small personal space, this cabin; among hundreds of other cabins, all crammed together and hurtling through space, in a ship smaller than some asteroids, as if one had nothing, as if one were a robot in a box, waiting to pop out and perform some mindless task. And so much came flowing out silently in his writing at night. On Scalos she had the breadth of a whole planet to herself: one day the goddess on top of a mountain, the next floating in the blue-green water like a carnivorous reptile, among the rocks, waiting for prey.

She had never seen another person in normal, voluntary sleep, and it fascinated her. The voyeurism of it, and the sheer chosen vulnerability of it, of one who seemed invulnerable, was hypnotic. Her red hair fell across her face as she sat watching, but she had learned not to brush it away, through the frozen gas. The vapor was turned off, and yet she still repressed an urge to brush her hair back with her hands. Her mother would have objected to such slovenliness, though perhaps not as much to this unwarranted surveillance. 

In the laboratory sleep of Deela and the Scalosians of the court, there was very little movement, and no sound that Sona could ever detect. But after her father surrendered to sleep, something plaintive came out in his human expression, as she sat on the floor in a corner. It seemed a mournful expression, now that the bones of his face had emerged from his youth, and lines and cracks appeared like a sign of bad plumbing underneath.

At one point, the pipes and valves must have changed temperature suddenly, for the great explorer let out a shudder of a private moan, even he himself could not hear. It was stretched out for nearly an hour, from her perspective, deep and resonant, like a call across the ages, and made her cringe, in sympathetic pain. In that instant, she resolved never to have any hidden sorrow or longing in any need of private tending. The cost seemed far too high.

She had the vaguest daughter’s insight that he was beseeching a universe that somehow broke his heart, that perhaps he’d wooed and won it, but could never live up to the full conquest of it. It was all being reckoned for him, and the doors of condemnation swung wide, in his sleep. But who would volunteer for such a thing? That was why the long shuddering moan escaped so deep from within him, Sona concluded: alone, and unconscious, he could acknowledge the Universe was too big, even for him.

She found herself going through his sentimental items on the shelves on the other side of his cabin, which included a conference area, and a little study at the far other end from his bed. Finally she too fell asleep over his writing table, poring over his captain’s log.

When she woke up, she found very little ship’s time had passed, and grudgingly pulled a large, leather-bound book out of a cubby-hole, to try to make sense of it. It began like poetry, but seemed to be about a Jean Val Jean, or set in a place called Jean Val Jean. The opening paragraph was completely indecisive. And was he a man, or woman, or a castle, or an idea? 

To her astonishment he was up and awake. When he finally, finally got to the cabin door, she could hurry out past him, and back to her own little room around the long corridor, where she immediately stretched back into the silvery suit. It had been a foolish idea to invade the captain’s quarters. Coming and going from there (she should have realized) would be far more difficult than exploring the engine room, or the transporter, as she had done already, in her wanderings. A few hours later, while she was still slowing down again, Sona heard the buzzer on her own door.

She didn’t want to sound too fast, so yet again she waited for what seemed like a long time, before going to the cabin entrance and pressing the button at the threshold. Of course, it was her father.

“I hope I didn’t wake you,” he said.

“Oh, no, I’ve been awake for hours,” she smiled, embarrassed, as if she’d been caught.

“Oh,” he said, wondering why he’d been standing there for nearly a minute. 

“I suppose I’d been ‘lost in thought,’” she sighed. “Would you like to come in?”

“No, I just— are you sure that cold-suit is right for you? Is it doing what it’s… supposed to be doing?”

“As far as I know. It’s certainly good at keeping me very cold all the time, I can tell you that!” she tried to make it sound funny, but her lips were numb. In this particular instance, she’d cranked the mechanism all the way up, to slow down to his level as quickly as possible. She supposed she’d be 100 years old before this was all done, with all the ups and downs.

“Well, we can get you a coat… or… something,” he said, looking off, thinking. It seemed he was missing the whole point of her conundrum, but how could she tell him she was still living in two different worlds? A few minutes later they stood at the quartermaster’s, where the computer asked her a half dozen questions about her native climate and showed her various pictures, before she settled on a free-flowing cape, with good heat-trapping powers. She selected a deep purple color, which seemed to catch the light, in when gathered into folds.

“Very impressive,” Kirk said, almost seeming to imply the lavish, hip-length cape might be too impressive, especially over the silver suit with that blue mist pouring up over her face like a Tholian mask. He knew there was a young lady underneath, but it was beginning to get a little hard to find.

“You look like Joan of Arc,” he smiled, as they walked around the ship. 

“I’ll have to look her up.”

“Please don’t!” He said, horrified all of a sudden, which made her laugh.

“Now I’m definitely looking her up,” the girl grumbled.

They got into a turbolift, and on a whim he took her down to the bottom of the ship’s “neck,” just above the huge sensor dish antenna, and to a small observation area looking out from under the great saucer section up above.

“In a way, I suppose I’ve always been looking for Joan of Arc,” he said, the ship now underway to its next port of call. She was waited for him to resume that line of thought. 

“She wanted to save her nation,” Kirk sighed, not at the pointlessness of it, nor at the madness of it, but the power of one person’s passion, to achieve such results. 

“And she did?”

“Well, yes, but she was burned at the stake.”

“Recently?”

“Centuries ago,” Kirk chuckled a wintry laugh. “But she lives on, in human memory. Passion, for a cause, is the surest way to travel through time.”

“Well, I’m not so sure about that,” she said, as the blazes of light drifted by outside, like slow-motion sparks, in the warp envelope. “And how many Joans have you known? And how many…”

“Were burnt at the stake? Very few,” he said, though the remnant of a smile stayed on his lips, at the scope of these women’s actions, in their lives. Of course, he’d never stop thinking about Edith Keeler, who died, seemingly inconsequentially, for monumental reasons. In a sense, he had burned her at the stake himself. His smile vanished, and he felt alone again, in spite of his daughter, in her strange mist and cape.

“Actually, I was going to ask how many of these Joan of Arc’s were actually males.”

“Surprisingly few,” Kirk nodded, as if confronted with an amusing fact of his own life. And a less amusing fact about men and women. If you didn’t count all the security men.

“I suppose it’s easier to burn a woman,” she sighed.

Now the mist that rose around her head seemed like a cold fire, and her face like the great torch burning inside. He had bungled the conversation, he realized, and changed directions.

“But most of them don’t get… burned at the stake. What usually happens is, when people realize the inevitability of progress and development, and the life-saving need to escape the stale trap of their societies, the angry mobs fall aside, and accept the need to grow and change. Mobs are like balloons: some float away, others are easily punctured.”

She only nodded, out of politeness. Her mind seemed elsewhere.

“I grew up,” she said at last, straightening her back and looking off into the middle distance, as if she were fifty, and not twenty, “around people who were asleep all the time. Sometimes I wanted to bang on their glass cases, to wake them up. I remember wanting to scream at my mother, as she lay there. I suppose I only wanted to prove that I existed. That I wasn’t merely some dream in their heads, that moved around them while they slept.” 

“I’m sure that was lonely,” he said. “But you were loyal to your calling, you didn’t just run away.”

“Oh, I did,” Sona smiled suddenly, the color rising in her cheeks.

“Oh really!”

“It was very stupid and silly,” she said, looking down. “I ended up hungry and even more alone.”

“How did they find you?”

“They were all asleep,” Sona reared back, though not in anger. “A chariot came, and found me in the woods. I was freezing, for a certainty. I suppose I could have died of exposure.”

“Well, I’m glad you didn’t die.”

“Yes, well, when you’re the only one who seems to be alive, you don’t exactly feel like you’re fitting in.” And now, it was all happening again, for half the time (for her) the crew of the Enterprise seemed frozen in time, as well.

“And how do you find life here on the ship?” he asked, after a moment.

“It’s very alive, I suppose.” She paused, and then sounded surprised: “They don’t seem to care about position or station or superiority at all,” she added, as crewmen passed by, chatting quietly.

“I hope not,” Kirk laughed. To him, it would be more accurate to say the crew was 'graciously deferential,’ in going about their scientific endeavors. 

“It almost makes a hierarchy seem absurd,” she added, blushing at her own royal culture.

“Life aboard a starship is very different,” Kirk smiled. “We have… virtually… everything we need, when things go smoothly. And a drive to sprawl outward, in our knowledge and understanding. Even though we know we’ll never catch the edge of the universe.”

“And when things aren’t so easy, the hierarchy reasserts itself?”

“I’m afraid so,” he said, with a shrug. It wasn’t that hard for him to shift gears. 

“Then there’s no room for Joan of Arc,” she concluded, as if betrayed.

“You never know,” he said.

“Message from Scalos, Captain,” Lt. Atangze said, as he and Sona emerged on the bridge, from one of the turbolifts. 

“On screen,” Kirk said, sitting in the command seat, which was unoccupied, as the ship was not on alert.

In a moment, the image of Deela, or perhaps her great-grandmother, still very thin and elegant, but well over 100, filled the main viewscreen. He could hear Sona gasp next to him.

“It is with great sadness that I must report my own impending death,” the suddenly ancient queen said, with great composure and perhaps a kind of… remorse? It may have been something completely different. But the loss of her flirtatious youth suggested all its opposites. Terribly aged courtiers slunk nearby, like old pigeons seeming lost, under a busy highway.

“The long freezing process and the difficulty in returning to our normal metabolic rate has, it seems, visited the same cellular damage on all of us, that sadly killed our past visitors.”

At that predictably self-serving comment, Kirk’s own momentary sense of sympathy and desolation was tinged with dismay. For he still remembered how one of his own crewmen suffered a similar fate, of hyper-decay, after hyper-acceleration.

“Compton,” he said, remembering the ensign’s name in a moment of silence. He had been descended from the family of a balloonist, a kind of explorer, in 19th Century America.

“It is our wish that the new queen, Sona, should continue for a time with her father, Captain Kirk, before returning to dispose of her royal heritage.”

Then there was another one of those strange, Scalosian pauses, as if more could be said with a stare, than could ever be said by words. He felt himself aging inside, as Deela weathered away in that long moment. “Look at me,” Deela seemed to be saying, with a slight cock of the head, “at how time has had the last laugh. Isn’t it… funny…”

He managed a side-long glance at Sona, enclosed in her frozen blue gaseous prison, looking more frozen in that moment than any cryogenic patient. Lt. Atangze pressed a few buttons, after a respectful silence, and the forward-looking image of the stars replaced the old woman in her seductive, gauzy trim.

“I’m so sorry,” he said, turning his chair and putting a hand on hers.

“Thank you,” she said, after a moment. 

“You don’t want to return to Scalos?” he asked politely.

“I’m not sure of the point,” she said quietly, as if weeping would be showy and insignificant, to the background noise of her own personal grief. She had barely known any of them, and yet everything she had known would die with them. How does one cry over that?

“I suppose I could form a memorial party of one,” Sona added. “But I’ve been that all my life.”

He did not want to encourage a maudlin attitude in his own daughter, so he simply nodded and turned to face the viewscreen once more.

“Status report, Lt. Sulu,” he said. Normally, one’s first officer would immediately step up to inform the captain of any recent developments, but Mr. Spock was away from his post. A second or two later, Lt. Sulu, the daughter of his first Enterprise navigator, turned halfway toward him, from the helm.

“We’re still a day and a half out of Gideon, sir, at warp five.”

“Very good, Lieutenant,” Kirk nodded. The sight of Deela, so aged so soon, only reaffirmed his sense that there was still an inescapable sort of justice in the universe. At least, now and then. And perhaps only here and there. 

“Will we meet my sister on Gideon, or my brother?” Sona asked, after another moment.

“I don’t know,” Kirk sighed, once again embarrassed by the fallout of his own catalog of romances. “It’s sort of a case study of adventures mislaid.” If nothing else, he’d learned how to find the meaning in almost any mission.

“Well, as long as you went to all that trouble in the first place,” she said, smiling for what seemed like the first time, having cracked the code of human irony. And, somehow, in that same moment of self-ridicule, he had discovered an unknown power of parenting: for the great good purpose of amusing his offspring. 

She was his own “Alice through the Looking Glass” in a way: someone quite the opposite, from his own reality, with no other connections whatsoever, when he had hundreds around him, all the time. There was something about her that was a natural explorer, and something about him that was a galaxy to be explored. He had something to offer once more. But, inevitably, she would slip through his fingers like water. Like everyone else.

“Oh dear, oh dear,” he sighed. She reached up and clasped his hand, which seemed warm to her, and he in turn held hers gently in his own. But with a terror it might age her.

In the day and a half that followed, they had many questions for each other, as they roamed the ship. 

“And what do you know of mathematics?” he would ask, for he discovered he had the right.

“I suppose that the numbers have to add up, and balance out, and represent a thing or an idea as accurately as possible,” she said, struggling to find the expression of a broad truth. “I hate to say that numbers are just for computers, but you don’t want the computers to feel utterly useless. The problem with mathematics is in defining what you really want to measure.”

“And what do you know of chemistry?” he asked.

“That there are volatile and combustible resources everywhere, and once they are used, they are used up finally. What remains is often bitter and burnt.”

“And of poetry?”

“Merely that there is no poetry, beyond the exculpation of men,” she sighed, over the shame of reason. And at these moments of moral impasse, she would turn and ask him questions.

“How many children have you fathered, entirely?”

“You mean, have been born because of me?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t know.” They were walking around and around the decks, one by one, sometimes going up five decks, sometimes going down a dozen, merely just to walk. Occasionally he would introduce her to a smiling crewman. In between those moments, their conversation would resume.

“And how many have you fathered… in any other way,” she said, sensing that she had previously asked the wrong question, or that, mathematically, there were other fields and quantities to be determined. Based on his very slight hesitation, or gentlemanly reserve.

“None, really,” he had to confess. For these were indeed two different things. And, to himself, he had to confess that the power of creation was something much worse, without nurturing. He had nurtured dozens, or hundreds, of crewmen, in a kind of fatherliness. He sensed this would be the darkest case study ever. He would appear to be returning to each world as a god of judgment. But without a godlike power, he would always visit half the judgment on himself.

“I find that very interesting,” she said, squinting slightly.

“That’s what I was afraid of,” he mused.

“Well,” she hastened to add, if only for his own peace of mind, “if all the women were royalty, then they’d certainly have had the wherewithal to raise a child by themselves. Were they all royalty?”

“No,” he had to admit, though the point could be argued. Royal in some ways, sometimes in opposite proportions— Deela herself had been ostensibly regal, but perhaps much less so in her ambitious use of her own power. For this is where the definition resides, in the balance between combustibles.

“I see,” she said, without rancor, seeming to imagine a powerless woman, with a great man’s child, somewhere in his past. She shook her head in mild dismay. “Then we are engaged in poetics.”

“The exculpation of men,” he nodded, disarmed. Another pair of crewmen passed, and nodded, seeming to have complete confidence in their own visions of Captain Kirk. It restored his outward sense of balance, a bit. And so he felt it was his turn to ask questions again.

“And how long do Scalosians typically live?”

“Oh, the usual,” she shrugged. “Though it seems much longer.”

“And this was the first time any of you— any of them— hit upon the idea of suspended animation, as a means of survival?”

“Why should we?” Sona sighed. “There was work to be done. All our men had gone sterile, and the sooner we saw to that problem, the better.”

“And how many other ships had been captured, for the purpose of sustaining the culture?”

“Oh, it’s always been that way,” she nodded, completely without remorse. “The problem goes back to time immemorial.”

“Well that’s very interesting,” he said politely, though it seemed he’d turned the tables on her. “But your planet must have gone centuries without drawing any attention, in the past.”

“It is the science of attraction,” she smiled ruefully. “I suppose it seems vicious to an outsider, but we spent a long time agonizing about it, at least from our point of view, a very long time, days and weeks. It was a trick of survival, drawing in new men. It seemed a bit repellent to me, I should say.”

“Well, I suppose that’s poetic. But, the whole time, were you working on a solution to reproduction, like cloning? Or taking the chromosomes out of one parent, and intricately matching them into the chromosomes of the other parent, or parents? Clearly you had the science, and the time, to solve the problem.”

“No, no, it was always just about intercourse. We couldn’t be bothered with all that,” Sona said. Her slight tone of dismissal, of pushing it all away, betrayed the nature of all sentient beings. For how could sex still be such a reckless, powerful thing? Because many wished it so, at least now and then.

“Well, then, I suppose my entire mission is complete,” he realized, as if they could turn the entire ship around and just go back to Earth. In this particular moment, it now seemed you couldn’t blame the bees for wanting to spread the pollen from one flower to the next.

And that raised a bizarre, entirely different question, or field of questions— did each woman he loved give him something, mentally or physically, or genetically, that he then spread to the next planet, and the next beautiful princess, as if each woman or world twenty years ago were some rare flower, and the women themselves were pollinating each other across a universe through James T. Kirk, and barely acknowledging his own contribution at all? How rude.

But, just as quickly, he understood the real danger of this Joan of Arc. She had broken out of her own confined garden, armed with his roaming spirit. God help the galaxy.

He saw her back to her cabin, and without really thinking about it, walked around to sickbay. There he found Dr. McCoy and Mr. Spock, seemingly engaged in some serious conversation.

“Am I interrupting?” 

“No, no, we were just passing the time of day,” McCoy said, as both men stood from the little computer station in the outer office, which led to the beds in the ward room.

“Please, sit,” he said, leaning himself against the shelf across from them. A lab technician was going back and forth in the next room, calibrating the exam screens and sensors over the beds with a small tricorder. Clearly, the ship’s chief medical officer, and the first officer, were both waiting for him to speak, as they resumed their seats, with perhaps a slightly more formal posture.

“Am I changed, by every alien woman I have sex with?” he asked, though neither man laughed.

“Well, if you mean physically, there are occasional changes, but nothing life-altering that I can determine,” McCoy said, growing perplexed at the question.

“But you can’t determine everything, without some evidence,” Kirk prodded.

“Do you have any new evidence, Jim?” McCoy’s question seemed faintly impatient, and Mr. Spock began to look as if his own sense of propriety were slightly at risk.

“It’s probably nothing,” he admitted.

“Whenever a patient says ‘it’s probably nothing,’ I always insist on a complete physical examination,” McCoy declared, rising very authoritatively now, and reaching for a diagnostic scanner, which he used to circle the captain’s head and torso and loins with, like a predatory insect.

“I don’t mean that kind of evidence, Bones,” Kirk said, twisting away from the little medical device as it went lower and lower.

“Well maybe you want to be a little more specific before wasting your doctor’s time like this!” McCoy bridled.

And so he explained his idea, that all these women were somehow, unknowingly, working together through him, to create some… alliance? 

“That’s poppycock,” McCoy snorted. “Why on Earth, or out in the middle of space, would any woman think that she and some unknown woman on the other side of Orion, quadrillions of miles away, could have anything in common, or some common, mutual ambition or goal…”

“We all have multiple levels of consideration,” Spock interrupted, finding his scientific bearing in the midst of an embarrassing discussion. “One cannot say, ‘here is a viral and attractive outsider, a traveler, whose genetics I might benefit from,’ without also wondering at all the other benefits one might accrue from such a dalliance.”

“Or she might just want to marry and settle down. Or she might just have a normal, healthy sex drive,” McCoy interrupted, beside himself at the usual one-sidedness of an all-male conversation about women.

“No,” Kirk said, as if demanding the conversation take a different tack. “When you’re in charge of an entire planet, in a vast and unknown galaxy, and you realize there may be other factors at risk, or, other factors that might accrue to your benefit.”

“And so now you’re the one who’s feeling used! Is that it, Jim?” McCoy refused to be swayed.

“No. The point is that the Federation is designed to create independent conditions for each world, so that each culture can arrive at its own solutions, and create entirely new ways of understanding the universe and itself, by itself.”

“Let me go and fetch my french horn,” McCoy said, rolling his eyes at the prettiness of it all.

“And if I’m just creating a federation within the Federation, they’ll twirl me around by my… braid, and throw me into the nearest wormhole.”

“It would be a remarkable turn of events,” Spock nodded. Though to which proposition he spoke, neither human could be quite certain.

“But planetary blocs exist already: Earth and the moon and Mars and Titan and Enceladus; and then there’s all of Rigel,” the doctor scoffed.

“But they lack any truly unifying factors, other than their own proximity,” Spock argued. And, suddenly, the argument carried a bit more weight. Now, like it or not, they would be uniting some number of worlds, on very specific terms, one by one, in the name of one man. And whether it was some bygone, common ambition on all those worlds, unspoken; or just his own youthful recklessness, there was now a greater-than-zero chance they’d all become united. Undoubtedly, Sona had brothers and sisters out there, somewhere.

“I suppose we can call them all the ‘seven sisters,’ McCoy sighed, imagining six more Sona’s, like the Pleiades, to lock into an unbreakable formation in the sky, along with her.

He would be right, in all but the mathematics of it.

A few hours later, Jim Kirk found his daughter ‘wall-climbing’ under the shuttle hanger, her breath smashing through the blue ice-gas in sharp panting, as she struggled to reach the next artificial cliff-face. 

When he first got his captaincy on the Enterprise, the long chamber had been the crew bowling alley, with the gravity all upside-down to accommodate the smooth lanes, on the “reverse-side” of the hanger deck. But the shuttle pilots (Kirk, himself, included) had this nagging sense that it interfered with their landings on the "top" side of the same deck. And gradually necessity crept in: new storage uses were found for the long narrow space, for more and more colony re-supply missions. The artificial gravity, when it was needed, was refocused to run lengthwise below the great flat shuttle deck, from front to back; and various compartmental storage areas were set up. This created a meandering vertical obstacle course of crates and boxes and tanks: running over a hundred meters from almost all the way up to the great sensor antenna, and the forward end of engineering, “up” to the elegantly tapered end of the lower nacelle, under the shuttle bay hanger doors all the way aft. It was literally more of a box-climbing challenge, but security officers and just everyday scientists could regularly be found down there, clawing their way up or down the bars and gaps, working off stress, or twisting and shaking off the rigor of sitting at a computer all day. In that sense, it was like yoga for the easily distracted.

“You caught up to me,” she said, as James T. Kirk swung with confidence across the same “crevasse” just below her.

“I know,” he said, also panting, for he had hurried to make it. “Every time we make a supply stop, the stacks are all different,” he said, squeezing past her, though only for a moment. “But we don’t arrive at any more Federation colonies till a… a few days from now,” he said, swinging “out” halfway into the cold between the inner hull’s girders and the rigid hexagonal struts, to let her pass him. 

“Do you spend this much time with all your visitors?” she asked.

“Well, when I have more children, you can all play together,” he predicted, finding a sort of comical misery in the nature of the voyage. “Comical Misery” was going to be his new middle-name, he decided. Either that, or “Panspermia.”

“If it were me,” she said, tapping the top of the ‘cliff' with a dash of ceremony, “I’d just put us all in some computerized school, and send us off to work, in colonies or labs.”

“That’s what usually happens,” he agreed, though there were seemingly an infinite number of types and varieties of colonies and labs, and labs to study colonies, and colonies to study labs, and meta-groups above all that. He likewise reached up and tapped the “upper” curve of the container wall, and a series of yellow lights began flashed on the hull behind them, “beneath” them, sequentially flashing all the way up to the front of the nacelle. The gravity began to reverse. And when the yellow lights slowed and dimmed again, they climbed forward.

“‘Alexander wept,’” James T. Kirk said, as they started over, back the way they came, “‘because there were no worlds left to conquer.’ He should have just turned around and started over.”

“Or let someone younger have a crack at it,” Sona said, having to look at everything backwards now, to achieve the same climbing goal. 

“Instead, I become the mountain,” Kirk smiled grandly, “instead, I become the cliff, and the bottomless pit beneath you,” he laughed, like an evil genius. They raced past one another, only faster.

“What do you want me to say,” she said, strangely thrilled he wouldn’t let her win. “That I’m just a pale imitation of you?”

“No,” he grunted, passing her on a shortcut, for he had already been back this particular way several times before. “You are the increase of the youngest captain of a starship ever—till fairly recently— and,” he panted, for it was much too much to jabber away and also climb competitively, “and the daughter of one of the most dangerous beauties in the galaxy.”

“I’m not as pretty as she,” Sona scowled, at an impasse, for they had been matching each other on the return path, each staying on the outer handles and bars and lift-grabs of the big containers stacked a quarter-mile long, opposite one another. The space to swing or hoist was much more limited on the outer edges, especially when you added in elbows and knees, chopping away at each other.

“Nonsense,” he snarled, instantly. “You’re at least twice as pretty as I am!” Though he was looking somewhat the worse for wear, in the middle of this double-climb. To further spoof her low self-esteem, he put a boot against the top of her head, and went swinging past her.

“You know I could just turn off this freezer suit, and be waiting for you at the top,” Sona warned, rubbing her scalp.

“I know,” he grunted, “and I’m very proud of you, that you haven’t.” He was finding this normal human pace hard enough to maintain.

“Flattery, I see, is one of your most clever tactics,” Sona said, mostly to herself.

“It’s just good management,” he said, after another few meters. “I just travel all over the galaxy, teaching good management, wherever I go.”

“Perhaps,” she said. After all, he had forced a note of patience and strategic thinking into Scalos, with their unexpected use of suspended animation. Even though the experiment seemed to have ended badly.

She caught up with him now. In a very brief moment he had stopped, testing the silence. And just as suddenly, the “whoop” of high alert was sounding, and the sequential lights behind them were flashing in red. He had somehow heard it before it happened.

Then she climbed past him— like the grazing flight of a meteor—and just as suddenly she stopped. Her own silver boot wavered over his head. With the barest hesitation, she tapped his own scalp with her toe, and he was left to hurry along behind her.


	4. Chapter 4

“Status report,” Kirk said, as he marched straight down to the captain’s chair, from a lift, and Mr. Spock unfolded his arms from their pyramid pose, which was peaked by his long fingers knitted together at the tips. They changed positions without taking their eyes off the viewscreen, and the source of the red alert.

On the main viewscreen was a hazy round dot of light. It was unexpectedly menacing in its indefinability, and how the object, and the space around it, seemed unfamiliar. There were no stars for one thing, just the hazy light.

“The image on screen represents an attack, which may or may not occur,” Spock said, keeping his own sense of intrigue down to almost nothing at all.

“I see,” Kirk lied.

“We created this composite image by overlapping combined sensor feedback, beginning with the quantum entanglement alerts we received from the transporter room.”

“Impressive,” Kirk agreed. But still… “Go to yellow alert,” he added, having mixed feelings about the absolute level of the danger ahead. The red lights stopped, and the captain could hear the security men's boots slide apart, into an at-ease pose behind him.

“The object shown in this image does not exist, physically, in this moment,” Mr. Spock went on. “It is a composite of energy readings from a single source ahead, that represents the early formation of a high-energy explosive. And while the danger is not imminent, the beings who appear to be preparing the attack have left important clues to their intentions, in the energy allotments, and focus, and even the preparations required for an attack.”

“But it is focused on the Enterprise.”

“That is the salient point,” Spock said, relaxing visibly, as if he had finally made it clear he was not just showing off the power of the ship’s nearly bizarre array of upgraded sensors and technology. And perhaps as if he had merely surrendered--yet again-- to the simplicity of human priorities.

“Well,” Kirk sighed, and readjusted himself in the big command chair, “we could go around it, warp nine, and catch them by surprise.”

“True, but this would allow us less time to accurately assess the attacker and their weaponry, and possibly begin talks to avoid a threat.” There was a pause. After all, no one was literally shooting, yet.

“Are we just running out of normal, everyday problems, Mr. Spock?” Kirk had to allow a slight shake of the head, as if waking himself from some vague nightmare. He was not seriously annoyed, but wondering again at the dangers of boredom in space. The Vulcan science officer nodded his head, very slightly on the diagonal, creating a wobbling appearance as he pursed his lips. 

“What do we know,” Kirk said aloud now, “about the source of this… attack?”

“They have a very high quality intruder detection system,” Scotty offered, barely looking over his shoulder, as he glanced back and forth between a hand-held and the blinking lights at the engineering console, over Kirk’s left shoulder.

Funny as this might be, Kirk knew it also suggested a heightened sense of defensiveness lay ahead. And at a similar time of great risk in Earth’s history, heavily armed nations enriched terrible men, using xenophobic threats of things to come. Would the Gideonites make the same awful mistakes?

“How close is it,” Kirk wondered. “Or, whatever those sensor readings are?”

“The focus of energy is directly ahead, matching our course and speed: distance, approximately one thousand, four hundred seventy three point one five seven kilometers. Not unlike a mechanical sentry, armed and escorting us, and marking their territory.” 

The amalgam of sensor readings, and computer simulations, overlaid, showed the entangled particles swirled before them like a snake. Just as with the immediate precursors to beam-up or beam-down, the bits of energy (which surround a crewman in the transporter beam) created a scaffolding to reconstruct a person— or in this case an explosion— from the other end.

“So it’s just a warning,” Kirk nodded.

“At this time.”

“They’re focusing their own version of a transporter beam directly ahead of us, though we won’t be ‘in range’ of their weapons for another three days.” The captain was slowly puzzling it all out.

“Correct.” There was another pause.

“Maintain yellow alert,” Kirk said at last. “But it’s not from Gideon?”

“It is almost certainly from there,” Spock corrected him. “But it would take three days for them to fully upload their destructive cargo and beam it to us, if our latest technical intelligence proves accurate. Assuming it isn’t already uploaded as a set of stored particles at some nearer prospect. In which case, less than three days, at our own present speed.”

“And we’ll be there… in a day and a half,” Kirk said, feeling a bit foolish now, for worrying.

“If Starfleet’s long-range readings prove accurate,” Spock repeated, very seriously, as if it all might matter, in a way they could not foresee, as if they might have a very large explosive device materializing inside the ship 36 hours from now. “However, it is entirely possible they could transmit the device, or something similar, much more rapidly, if our readings are not accurate. Or if we provoke them somehow. Or if their transporter and weaponry are located off-planet, and could be moved closer to us in the interim.”

And this is why you can’t run a starship with a computer, Kirk thought to himself. Yet it wasn’t an honor any sane man would desire.

“Open a hailing frequency to Gideon,” he said, pushing himself back into the center seat with a familiar, contrary sense of reaching into the unknown.

“Aye, sir,” Lt. Xanders nodded, over their right shoulder. “It’ll have to be a message, sir, they’re still four hours away, by subspace communication. Unless you want to beam a message directly into that swarm.”

“No thank you,” Kirk said. 

He folded his legs and leaned forward, to begin a familiar communication. Xanders was focusing on the planet's previously known communications channels from their console.

“This is Captain James T. Kirk, commanding the USS Enterprise. We are approaching on a peaceful mission. We appeal to you, as civilized beings, to remove your energy… locus… from our path. Please respond, and we will act accordingly,” he added, hoping the nuance would come through loud and clear. 

He relaxed again. “If nothing else, we know the Gideonites have some version of a deep space transporter beam. That’s interesting.”

“Well, that’ll happen when you build an exact replica of the Enterprise,” Scotty said, even more satirically than before, at the engineering station. As a deception, a barely functional, subterranean starship had been built, as part of an intensely baroque scheme to end Gideon’s nightmarish population crisis.

“And yet, in spite of their scientific advancement,” Spock said, stepping back up to his station, “the planet maintains its own voluntary quarantine, against intruders. It seems illogical to have so broad a reach, into space, combined with a hatred of interstellar relations.”

“We might yet change their minds, Mr. Spock,” Kirk nodded, with a mild hopefulness. Although his next thought was, what if their own self-imposed quarantine had broadened and become much stronger over the last twenty years? That, too, seemed a possibility. And what if it was all made worse by his own first contact?

So inevitably he became consumed with the thought that all this was in vain, that no one had ever learned any lessons at all, from the solutions he had attempted to patch together, from planet to planet, in his own optimistic youth. What if things were just as bad, or even worse, on every planet he’d come into contact with? Scalos lay in ruins, and the planet up ahead had made a mess of its population problem, and then come up with a sort of holy martyrdom to solve that problem, infecting its own princess, Odona, with an exotic virus from Kirk’s own blood.

“Readings on long-range scans,” he said, as a yeoman handed him a report for his signature. 

Spock recited form memory. “Our scans indicate a reduced population, though still high by environmental standards: approximately seven billion humanoids. Indications of mass disease, famine, violence and war, commensurate with social tensions.”

“They had a big decision to make, with space travel, and they… decided not to make it,” Kirk summed up. He checked a few boxes on the computer tablet and handed it back to the yeoman. 

“Our own prior contact suggests,” Spock tilted his head, “they had long been a society ruled by a fear of their own mortality. And what each of us should choose to fear,” the Vulcan added somberly, as a personal aside, “becomes a cruel master.”

“But, they were… entirely at peace, when we came,” Kirk shook his head, dismayed.

Everything looked so simple, till you looked again. Tens of billions of Gideonites, crammed together, endlessly squeezing past one another in sexless body suits, no room to breathe, or rest, or even live, in any way we understood it. All for ‘the love of life.’ Their massed heartbeats, against a buried, false Enterprise, became a maddening drumbeat. If you could call that “peace.”

Spock used his handheld to change the main viewscreen to a composite image, of the stars ahead, rushing toward them at warp five: mathematically equivalent to the speed of light, raised to the fifth power. But there was also that threatening quantum swirl, like a swarm of brilliant white yellow-jackets, from the Gideons’ defensive beam.

Such were the ghosts of 23rd Century science, the echoes— not only of the past— but of the future, of a million things that wavered like a mirage on the horizon. In their spare time, everyone on board now gazed upon the Gideon swarm. In such moments, a general sense of foreboding could easily grasp the soul: as if the future was already folding back on itself, and the Universe were snapping all the way back to that infinitely small singularity in an instant, before our very eyes. And no one could tell the story fast enough to stop it, or fully observe it, or even understand what was happening, before it all shut down. Everyone who rode the edges of known space fought against the sense of dread, though it hadn’t found a voice. Merely to contemplate it was a form of surrender. The tyranny of self-hood could not allow it.

And if that brought with it a kind of self-fulfilling doom, a fear of the future that had once been our greatest hope, it was a colossal irony that had yet to be acknowledged in this hypothetical, unrecognizable, imaginary moment of universal collapse. Every step forward seemed haunted by the strangeness of a newer threshold to be met: demanding we either be born anew in boldness; or crushed in that initial spark. Or both. Or neither. It seemed impossible the Universe could simply expand faster and faster, forever and ever.

He wanted to increase to warp nine, just to ram it down their throats, Gideon’s own hostility or fear of the unknown, their unwillingness to meet the challenge, to wallow in what they were. But it would be no better than forcing an anguished clash, face to face, with no room left to find a thing more pleasant and lasting. Whether it was his first day as captain, or his last, his job was still to make things better.

Four hours later Gideon received the greeting, and four hours later (for better or worse) there was no reply. A silent, threatening hostility had become the default setting in the relationship. Or so it seemed.

And when a day and a half of that had lapsed, Kirk emerged on the bridge once more, as they made their final, sublight approach to orbit. There had been no rocket or warhead, to materialize out of the entangled particles that still shown in the center of the viewscreen. There was something fulsome and artificial about the long-distance view, though. The temperate zones in the sunward hemisphere were green and cultivated. And on the winter’s half, less agriculture, but it was still optimized for planting in cold weather, winter wheat and such. 

“It appears they have remained primarily in underground dwelling spaces,” Spock said, as he stood by Kirk in the well of the bridge.

“And the wars, and the ravages, Mr. Spock?” Kirk was hard-pressed to see any sign of it.

“The population has been vastly reduced since our last call,” the Vulcan insisted, a bit more steadfast. “There are ruins of both the physical, and cybernetic aspects of the culture, below the surface. But of course, whatever befell them has inevitably given the survivors additional ‘breathing room’ as well.”

“What you’re saying is that it wasn’t just… sound birth control,” Kirk said. “Not that I’m one to talk,” he added. In spite of it all, Spock seemed troubled by the conditions ahead, if Kirk had learned anything about the Vulcan’s expressionless-expression over the years.

Now the swarm on the screen, the lights from the planet’s transporter beam, made the planet seem to crawl with some other kind of activity.

“Sensors reading chemical rocket launch on the surface,” Chekov said, from the helm control ahead of Kirk. 

“Red alert,” the captain said, automatically. The call was repeated by Xanders, at the communications station.

“Distance to Gideon,” he asked, flatly.

“Still a quarter million miles, Captain,” a young helmsman said. In the old days of chemical rocketry on Earth, it would take a rocket at least a few days to cross a similar distance, nearly a quarter million miles to the moon.

“Full stop.” 

“Aye, sir,” Lt. Sulu nodded, and tapped a few light pads, before her hands slid down from the helm.

“Now we wait another two or three days,” Kirk added, imagining chemical rockets toddling their way. “Any readings on the planet’s launch?”

“On screen,” Spock said, as the expansive image wavered, like ripples of water. A capsule, surrounded by a crown-like ring of booster rockets, shuddered up through the rough atmosphere, trailing orange fire and white vapor. 

Two by two, the boosters fell away, and what remained was a thinly visible, haloed superstructure. The last two rockets, not firing, lay opposite one another with that command capsule in between: locked in the center of a gear-like ring. 

“Readings on payload,” Kirk prodded quietly.

“Good grief,” Spock said, perhaps for the first time in his life. He stepped up to the science station for a second look, then tapped a touchscreen, and the big image at the fore of the bridge wavered again. Now they could see a close up, jumping image through the upper atmosphere, of what appeared to be crewmen, in heavy armored suits, all strapped outside the ship, around the girders and grid-work of the booster ring: bracketed onto the spidery super-structure like dozens of individual little capsules, in their thick metallic suits— sun-shields on the visors clamped-down; metallic arms and legs being the only outward indication of each of the mad humanoids inside the coccoon-like suits.

“Now that’s what you call launch-commitment,” Scotty sighed, feeling horrible for the brave warriors pinned inside the girders.

“Life readings?”

“They are alive,” Spock announced, as if that alone were a surprise. A moment later, he added, “Sensors show sixty-four life readings on the outer structure, with an inner crew of six in the capsule itself.”

Lucky bastards, Kirk thought to himself, of the pilot and officers in the central module. But was this better, or worse, than warheads?

“They seem to have a very high tolerance for discomfort,” Kirk said, of the Gideonites in general.

“Agreed,” the first officer said, as the entire bridge crew stared in grim fascination. The dozens of combatants, locked onto their vessel as it shuddered into space, seemed destined for a rough re-entry, eventually, under the best of circumstances. Kirk supposed the remaining two non-firing nacelles would have to slow their return to the surface.

“For a timid, non-space-going culture, that’s quite a display,” Kirk said, to fill the silence. There was an ancient Chinese legend on Earth, of an entire regiment that went out before its enemy, the first wave of soldiers marching to an onslaught. That first rank knelt on the field of battle, and simply cut their own throats, as a demonstration of bravery and commitment. The opposing troops fled the field, or so the story went, at the sight of such madness. 

“Any further readings on their transporter beam,” Kirk added, though the sensor mock-up, of the swirling lights, had been absent from view for the last several minutes, at least during high magnification.

“No change,” Spock answered, after checking again.

“Bring us in closer,” Kirk said. The Gideonites were making such an entrance of it, it seemed anticlimactic to let them putter slowly to close the gap to the Enterprise for another three or four more days. And who knew how long those fighters, even in their big primitive suits, could survive outside like that?

“Resuming course,” Sulu said, using one hand to engage the sub-light engines at the rear of the main saucer. “One tenth impulse drive.”

“Keep an eye on that energy field, Spock,” the captain said, as they closed in. At about two hundred miles’ range, he stepped up to the turbolift, to leave the bridge. “I’m going over to that ship. Alone.”

“I hate to send you across like this sir, through their own transporter beam on the surface,” Lt. Kyle said, as Kirk hopped up to the beaming chamber, six glassy lenses, and six individual energy collectors, concealed in the hoods overhead. 

“I hate it too, Mr. Kyle,” Kirk said, and nodded to start the beaming process. But still, in a moment, he was gone.

Then he had a sense of doom: as one gets in a transporter malfunction, of being in two places at once, or possibly a third— Kirk had this persistent image of a huge metallic dish antenna, pointed up into the midday sky, from the bottom of a forested valley, and being somehow suspended above it, or falling toward it; and of Mr. Kyle at the Enterprise transporter console working furiously; and of himself materializing in a darkened command room on an alien spaceship: all three, flickering back and forth. There wasn’t time to put it all into words, in his head, but he knew he was in for a rough ride.


	5. Chapter 5

It was a losing battle, and Mr. Kyle had to give up, to keep from tearing his captain apart. 

The Gideon beam, which had reached far out into space, was not as elegant as that of the Enterprise. But it certainly got the job done. Emerging with a fearsome crack! James T. Kirk stood in an underground chamber, where the lens and refractor were placed sideways, two monstrous devices, and him standing between.

The hulking object on his left resembled a three meter cube of yellow ice, a thin layer of steam or gas rising off it—probably the lens. And on the right was a dark, grotesque collection of burnt-looking jet engine parts, with the two-meter wide blast nozzle pointed at him, also smoldering, after a voyage he had not planned. Evidently the refractor, though it did not fill him with gratitude, to be reassembled by something as primitive as that.

He tried not to glance at his fingers, to check the materialization, as he stepped out from the chamber. When he could bear the suspense no longer, he pretended to be as nonchalant as possible, as if checking the quality of a manicure.

“Ah yes,” an older gentleman said, approaching with a sarcastic smile, “the source of all our troubles.” There were four guards behind him, following along with weapons on their hips.

Kirk identified himself in the usual way, and demanded an explanation.

“We know who you are, Captain,” the robed elder said, coming to a stop a mere seventy-five centimeters in front of him. “The father of rebellion.”

“That’s… quite a distinction,” Kirk nodded, wondering how easy it would be to grab the fellow and use him as a shield against his own troops. “Coming from a race of kidnappers.”

“I suppose we should thank you, Captain,” the Gideonite mused. “Our circumstances have vastly changed since your last visit.”

“I see,” Kirk nodded. “And whom do I have the pleasure of addressing?”

“I am Tabar Iliane III,” the gentleman said, as if reciting poetry. 

“But not everything’s changed,” Kirk circled-back. “This is the second time you’ve abducted me. Where is Odona?”

“Of course, the mother of your madness,” Tabar said, stung at the mention of her name.

“You’ve told yourself this story many times, it seems,” Kirk nodded.

“We endured much loss, Captain,” Tabar explained.

“Well,” the captain said, taking in a long breath, “I’ve come to find out. Please tell me.”

Tabar led him through a corridor to spartan parlor, ceremonial rugs on the walls, and a few bronze-colored, tent-like veils hanging from the ceiling across to the corners of the room. And, hanging over a lifeless fireplace, what appeared to be a collection of old titanium forceps, and other primitive birthing tools. Or perhaps merely some very expensive tongs for the fire that had gone out, untended.

“As you may know,” Tabar began, pouring the tea, “a plague ravaged our planet soon after you left. It was an extremely dark time.”

“Made so,” Kirk nodded, accepting a small cup of steaming fragrant orange water, “by centuries—or millennia— of runaway population growth.”

“Just so,” Tabar said. Each man was steadily tapping with an invisible shovel on the solid rock of the other’s heart. “And, doubtless there were some, among the fifty-eight billion, who died willingly, after the unbearable crush you witnessed, during your last… visit.”

“You were going to say ‘invasion,’” Kirk supposed. It was one of those moments of diplomacy where the ‘social contract’ seemed to be burning away in one’s hands.

Tabar allowed a smile.

“Back then you specifically asked for me to come down here,” Kirk prodded, though there was no point shaking people out of their deeply held beliefs. It usually ended badly.

“Our old leaders were fools!” Tabar exploded, as if God had previously thrown up a horrible mirror to their populace, in the form of a ridiculous leader. “And it was an invasion, probably one of the worst in the galaxy, of biological warfare!”

“I woke up with a bruise on my arm, and heard much talk of a beautiful sacrifice to come!” Kirk presented an energetic defense. 

“And now such ‘forced sacrifice’ has become an institution on our world, Captain,” Tabar nodded. He pressed a button on the table in front of him, and a dim screen came to life on the wall. 

“I don’t know what happened, Mr. Spock,” Kyle fretted, as the two men stood over the transporter console on board the Enterprise. “After the lens overload, and the fire, and the shut-down, there was a hiccup, a discrepancy—“

Spock touched the intercom at the top of the transporter console.

“Security, location of the Scalosian passenger Sona.”

“One moment,” the voice on the other end replied. In a few seconds, Lt. Haines’ voice came on, warm and twangy, but a little alarmed.

“Mr. Spock,” she began, “we’ve had trouble keeping track of her since she came on board. Like you said, she has these little moments of ‘acceleration.’ And then goes ‘blipping’ into another location. Usually not so far away. But she’s still without a firm coordinate. We can’t pin her down, and it’s been maybe ten minutes. Still ‘blipping’.”

“Understood,” Spock said. He double-clicked the intercom button. “Helm, scan the launched Gideonite vessel for readings of the Princess Sona.”

After a moment, Chekov’s voice acknowledged the command. “Yes sir,” he replied, “she’s over there now!”

“Evidently she was able to duplicate the previous operation of the controls, as we had programmed them,” the Vulcan said, studying the transporter panels, and the 3-D tracking scanner in the middle. Gideon had done something similar, twenty years earlier. "And she, evidently, ended up where the captain had intended to go."

“The problem, Mr. Kyle,” Spock sighed, “is that we have a much-needed supply run ahead of us, which is likely to be delayed.”

“Yes, Mr. Spock,” the Britisher nodded, as if this were his own fault. Both mens’ eyes ended up on the smoking glass plate across the room, where the captain stood just minutes ago.

She decided she’d just keep defying them all, until they’d finally give in. Sona deactivated the cooling unit in her suit, under her cape, and (to their eyes) disappeared for a third time, in the dark control room of the Gideonite vessel. It gave her time to move past the gang of young men, frozen again in their sashes and black slacks, bare-chested under the diagonal drapes of fabric that hung from their brawny shoulders. She had to admire their determination.

As she squeezed under the arm of one of her would-be captors, she could see out through a small portal, to the rows of people hanging outside on the ship’s superstructure, in the blackness above the planet. She felt a strange kinship with them, freezing out there till they were needed.

“I can do this all day,” she said, when she’d cooled down again, reappearing in a buzzing blur, to their eyes. “But I’d rather not.”

Now the young men turned very slowly, to unwind the twist in each of their necks, and rebalance like an ambush of tigers. You could see the gamesmanship on their faces. And somehow (some looking more like Odona than Kirk, others, the other way around) they gradually decided to become at least halfway charming. Furrowed brows softened to half-smiles.

“I am Sona, the princess— well, now I suppose the queen— of Scalos, a planet you’ve probably never heard of. It’s been under Federation quarantine, which, I suppose you... have heard of. Which one of you is the leader? You all look alike to me…”

“We are brothers, soldiers in restoration of the great epoch,” the brash young man in the brightest metallic sash said, stepping forward. 

“Brothers ‘in arms’?” she asked. “Or… actual brothers?”

“The Gideon reproductive system mates every DNA cell from the father, up with an equal number of DNA cells from the mother,” another one of the brothers piped up. 

“Some are born singly, others in two’s, or three’s, or even four’s, with longer and longer gestation times,” another Kirk explained. 

“The first one,” the young man in the brightest sash seemed to indicate himself, “is born the smallest, and quickest.” They were all twins, or 70-tuplets, to include the ones hanging out there in the cold.

“And the first one faces the greatest challenges,” one of the others said, with teasing grandeur. All five younger brothers laughed at the recitation of a familiar line.

“Sounds like a real time-saver,” Sona nodded, though she herself had never heard of tribbles. Once again, she surveyed the young men before her: each one remarkably similar to the others. And most of them, to her own Earth father.

“And those, out there?” she asked, as if she couldn’t possibly have guessed.

“The same,” another young man said with a cocky air. She turned back to their apparent leader.

“And why did you threaten the Enterprise with a transporter bomb?” she asked, matter-of-factly.

They all stared back at her.

“This is very interesting,” Sona nodded, one hand still on her freezing pack, in case of any further misunderstanding.

“Computer!” the captain of the Kirks said suddenly, and she sensed another complication. She touched the freezer control, and the six young men became as still as statues around her. She didn’t know what was likely to happen, and insinuated herself just behind the leader.

The downside to all this, of course, was that she had no end game, and when they talked so slowly, she couldn’t quite figure out what they were saying, or planning next. She decided to head for the hatch at the back of the control room, assuming it must lead down to bunks or a bathroom or something, or possibly an escape pod. As tough as they claimed to be, they still had to have a bathroom, right?

The other question was, what had happened to the original Captain Kirk? In her accelerated state, she followed after, into the beaming chamber, having run the controls all over again: walking to the empty pad, expecting to land in the same spot, a few seconds later. 

Sona explored the bunks below decks, just two of them, for (she presumed) three eight hour shifts for the six inside. They were as plain as an unused storage bin. And then she tried to get into what appeared to be an airlock, but it wouldn’t budge.

Her own genetics were telling her to go back up and try to strike a deal with her half-brothers, when she heard a deep “clunk!” and a low, haunting moan behind her. They were already trying to force her back up there, by opening the aft hatch into space. There was a soft red glow on the metallic surfaces around her, that gently faded, from a blaster’s bolt. Meantime, the first icy flame of frozen cabin vapor billowed outside. Well, it wouldn’t hurt if she let them think they were clever.

Another burst of red light spread overhead, and she looked up to see it dissipate horizontally, like a failed tornado cloud, into the shadows of the gangway. She grabbed the first rung of the ladder to go up.

They were all crouched together in firing positions toward her, at the back of the control room, their blasters focused on the oval opening to the vertical gangway. Three more blobs of brilliant red light floated toward her as she stepped out, a barrage that ought to have kept her trapped, coming from the knot of flashing muzzles just before her. But she merely picked the weapons out of each of their hands, after another one had fired, and wove her way around them yet again. She stepped behind them, and cooled down to talk.

“That’s not very nice,” she said, as they all turned around to face her. She was as laconic and dismayed, as each of them were fierce and full of adrenalin. “Now, let’s talk.” 

Just as she was beginning to realize she’d only collected five blasters, the sixth Kirk tumbled down on top of her, from above a row of computers.

“Yes, let’s,” he said, face to face with her, having knocked her down. He wore the brightest sash, and pinned her hands to the deck as the others gathered their weapons.

“Either way, you were headed for disaster,” Kirk, the original, said, in the tent-like room with the Gideonite ruler.

“And by thrusting a stick in the gears,” Tabar nodded, first contemptuous, and then with a strangely encouraging smile on his face, as if talking to a psychopath: “you only hastened the inevitable.”

“You speak as though I had a choice in the matter,” Kirk said, unimpressed.

“You could have stayed away!”

“You could have not built an exact replica of my ship!”

Tabar nodded again, as if this were all very usable evidence against the human, in some invisible courtroom that lay around them. When did every humanoid become so doggedly self-righteous, Kirk wondered, as Tabar paced in the opposite direction.

“When I was in Starfleet,” Kirk mused, “they taught us that when a society becomes self-sufficient, it has a dual problem. On the one hand, it tends to close up, at least in terms of its identity, becoming rigid and unable to accommodate new ideas, in a kind of self-congratulation. Because it had reached this stage of cultural ‘success’ after terrible struggle. And on the other hand, at the same time, that world begins to devour its own higher ideals, as an unexpected consequence of its stagnation, and its own… pride.”

He let that last word hang in the air.

“And you suppose your Starfleet theories apply to all alien worlds, regardless of species or heritage?”

“I merely state the theory,” Kirk said, amused that he was sounding like his own first officer.

“Which you are happy to apply to Gideon.”

“In the absence of new information,” Kirk readjusted himself in the little chair. “And if it applies to ten or twelve other planets at random…”

“This is the trap of openness!” Tabar said, adopting a tone of offense, and seemingly unaware of the contradiction in his terms.

“No, it’s the trap of the scientific method,” Kirk said, as diplomatically as possible. “Just trying to see if the shoe fits,” he added, “like the magical prince, looking for the magical princess.”

“Now you tell me fairy stories,” Tabar exploded. 

“Should I simply subscribe to the notion,” Kirk rose now, raising his voice as well, “that everything you do is right, and everything I do is wrong?”

“If the shoe fits, Captain.”

“You mismanaged your way into the madness of overpopulation, and after that, into a plague of your own choosing. And yet nothing is ever your fault.”

There was a bitter pause as Tabar inhaled deeply, and tried to sum up the history of his own civilization.

“We bore many thousands of years of devastating loss: horrifying rates of infant mortality; our women dying in great numbers, in the turmoil of multiple, attenuated births that took up their entire adult lives, birth after birth. When our science finally caught up with all of that, we could not change our beliefs as quickly as we changed our circumstance. Our development as a race could not keep up with our development as a culture.”

“Yes,” Kirk nodded, eager to be humbled along with him. “On my planet, starvation and subsistence were the norms, for thousands of years, until about three or four hundred years ago. Food suddenly became plentiful. But our people, mistrusting the new reality, still ate, and reproduced, as if the entire planet… faced war and starvation every day. We encountered entirely new problems, as the old ones were solved. As you say, it was thousands of years of harsh, ingrained reality, coming head to head with all the new possibilities of science.”

“And now we have run out of ‘new possibilities.’”

“Not as long as we go on living, sir.”

The brash young rebel, laying atop the last queen of Scalos, slowly appeared on the transporter pad in a swirl of lights, provocatively spread out on the platform.

“I’m gonna need you all to stand up, okay?” Lt. Haines declared, seeming only mildly embarrassed, as she held a phaser pistol in both their faces, like a flashlight in the hands of a movie usher at the back row of a cinema.

“Okay, now technically, you two are not under arrest,” Haines continued in a very no-nonsense tone of voice, though her phaser lagged on them, as they rose to their feet. Spock and Kyle looked on, from where they stood on the other side of the transporter console, for any resemblance between the young man and their captain. 

“I know who you are,” Haines said, to the runaway Sona. “Who the hell are you?” she demanded, of the young man.

“Prince Amar, of the planet Gideon,” the young man nodded, adjusting the sashes over his bare shoulders.

“Yeah, well, you all princes and princesses, ain’t you,” Haines muttered, and looked to the ship’s first officer, for any further orders. “And keep your damn hands off that freeze-belt, young lady,” she said suddenly, turning back and waving her phaser at Sona’s right hip. “Phaser stun hurts, you hear what I’m sayin’?”

“Yes ma’am,” Sona said.

“All right then.” Now Haines kept her eyes on the princess.

“Technically I’m a queen,” Sona corrected the other woman, though it gave her no pleasure.

“Of a dead planet!” Haines shot back. There was a terrible pause.

“Is that what phaser stun feels like?” Sona sighed.

“Yeah, well, maybe,” Haines nodded, sounding a little apologetic.

“Looks like you outrank me,” Amar smiled, at Sona.

“Yeah,” Haines interrupted without hesitation, putting the young man in his place all over again, “and you better check the back side of that royal flush, Prince, cause you’re both dealt out of the same deck!”

The analogy to cards was lost on Amar. But he seemed accept the notion that whoever held the blaster had the final say.

“This is Commander Spock,” the Vulcan said into the intercom atop the console. “Send two female security guards to the transporter room.” 

At that, Haines knew it was time to step back, and that someone lower-ranked in her own fiefdom could manage the situation from here on out.

There was a strange comfort in being faced with the usual problems, of simply having one’s captain held captive by an enemy, or suffering the unintended consequences of his romantic exploits. And so Mr. Spock only nodded slightly, as two younger women in red tunics hurried in, and he could concentrate on getting him back once more.


	6. Chapter 6

“Well I don’t like it,” Dr. McCoy said. 

Mr. Spock, who had taken the spot at the end of the table next to the yeoman and her computer, nodded over the unsolvable puzzle of too many Kirks.

“Even if we don’t take them in, there are risks,” the science officer said, through his orange fingertips. “If they return to the surface, they face retaliation from the same people who are holding the captain.”

Sona and Amar sat on opposite sides of the table, not speaking since they entered the room on deck six, or even looking at one another. 

“If I may speak, in defense of my own brothers,” Amar began, looking down at the table’s surface, “we would be happy to stay in your brig— happier than our fate on Gideon.”

“We cannot jail you without charges,” Spock corrected the young man. “It is conceivable that we could hold your group in the shuttle bay, and drop you off at our next port of call, which should be relatively safe, at an established colony.”

The steady thrum of the ship’s idling engines filled the room.

“I shall put a call in to Mikhos IV, and determine their sentiments on the matter,” Spock said. But he seemed reluctant to bring the official meeting to a halt. “Mr. Amar,” he said after a very short moment had passed. “How do you assess the danger of sending a security team down to Gideon, to free the captain?”

“It would be a fortified building, with guards and sonic blasters,” Amar said, looking up at the outward-tilting bulkhead across the room from him. “You could offer a hostage bargain, one or more of us—“

“We are not in the business of trading flesh, young man,” McCoy spoke up again.

A boatswain’s whistle interrupted the discussion, and Mr. Spock reached forward to touch a white oval button that had lit up, next to the comm link on the table.

“This is Commander Spock.”

“Mr. Spock,” Scotty’s voice came through, “the planet has locked its transporter beam on the crew ship below.”

“Warn them to cease immediately, and lock forward phasers on the transmitter.”

“Phasers on standby,” Mr. Chekov’s voice replied, also from the bridge.

“Spock out.”

Amar seemed to be pushing himself up to a standing position, with a great battle inside, over whether or not to start shouting and waving his arms in a state of alarm. His hands clenched the edge of the table, and he seemed to have pushed back his chair by an inch, and leaned forward. But he wavered, as if a hand on his shoulder were keeping him from springing into action. At his left, Lt. Haines was keeping an eye on him. The two female guards stood on either side of the table, one behind each visitor.

“Commander Uhura,” Spock said, touching the little intercom light again, having seen Amar’s inner struggle. 

“Go ahead, Mr. Spock,” the voice of the Enterprise replied.

“Confirm message to the surface.”

“Message confirmed. No reply sir.”

“Helm, bring us around, between the planet and the smaller ship, shields toward the surface. Maintain offensive posture, shields and targeting.”

“Aye, sir, right away,” Lt. Sulu said.

“We shall continue this conversation at a later time,” Mr. Spock said, standing with his usual calm demeanor. The red alert klaxon sounded, and he instinctively grabbed the table.

There was a tremendous “crash!” and the ship reverberated with the impact of an energy burst. Everyone at the table struggled to their feet, and for the automatic doors, which opened to reveal a handful of crewmen hurrying back and forth to their stations, or picking themselves off the deck in the corridor.

“Red alert,” Uhura’s voice came down through the speakers, a little late, but for the sake of clarity.

The command officers split up as they left, taking separate turbolifts, one up to the bridge, the other down to Security and Engineering. McCoy stood with Amar and Sona, and their guards, and waited for a third capsule: as the corridor emptied out, and the red light overhead flashed in silence. He unconsciously touched the bulkhead with his hand, as the ship’s impulse drive moved them in closer, into the path of that beam.

“What’s happening,” Sona asked, as they waited. The two Enterprise security women on either side of her, Rogers and Eskandar, kept their eyes on the freezer-unit on her belt.

“Well,” McCoy shook his head, for he could only speculate. As he spoke, his eyes wandered along the far bulkhead, before finally looking back toward the girl from Scalos. “Knowing Mr. Spock, I imagine he’ll try to contact the planet one more time— maybe two! And ask them very politely to turn off that transporter-disruptor weapon. Then they’ll probably ignore him, because he’s so polite, and they’re so xenophobic. And he’ll probably have to blast it to bits. Or something like that.”

“Won’t that endanger the captain?” she said, and both she and Amar seeming perplexed.

The turbolift opened, and McCoy stepped in. But as he turned, he held the door for one last remark.

“Mr. Spock’s first responsibility is to get us to our next official port of call, Mikhos IV, for a re-supply mission, and routine medical checkups,” the doctor replied, tartly. “After that, he has to take into account the safety of any passengers, then the crew, including the captain himself; and lastly, the ship. Anything else along the way is just… fireworks.”

The door snapped shut, and the doctor was whisked two floors down to sickbay. The four who remained, waiting for a lift, let his words roll around in their heads for a moment.

But it had been a sober assessment of Jim Kirk’s fate. All of this was getting in the way of the supply chain, at minimum; and could reshape Federation history, one way or another.

“So, what’s your name,” Amar asked, smilingly, of the closer of the two security women. But he was even younger than the two ensigns, so they acknowledged him, with a hint of scorn. It would be like sleeping with James T. Kirk, back in the swinging 2260’s, or before that, the young security women supposed. And, for a security officer (after a certain point), recklessness became overrated.

“Don’t you two ever feel… like a very expensive pair of handcuffs?” he continued, undeterred, and close enough that one of the women could feel his warm breath near her ear. His eyebrows rose up in hushed speculation: “Would you ever like to try out… a very expensive pair of handcuffs?”

Then there was one of those awful, out-of-nowhere fights that only seem to erupt in the curving halls of the USS Enterprise, as Sona shoved the other ensign, and Amar tried to hold the first by her elbows, behind her, while she kicked at him, backward. In a buzzing blur, Sona vanished, and Amar’s hands flew up in an apologetic surrender. The two young women pressed against him in a very non-sexual way. And yet Amar had to struggle to look as though he wasn’t enjoying it, on some level that seemed foreign to the ensigns.

“Let’s go down to the brig, and try on some handcuffs right now,” the first one, Rogers, snarled, as she and her partner glared, their phasers out. The lift doors opened, and down they went.

Unbeknownst to the other three, who had arrived at the brig, Sona had also entered the lift along with them. Now, she climbed a service ladder up the neck of the Enterprise to the transporter room. From there she could beam back to the other ship, or down to the planet. Probably in the midst of some kind of battle. At least she had time to figure it out.

She climbed back down the service ladder to the officers’ mess, and took a few pieces of food off the plates of the more animated-looking men and women, who’d be less likely to notice. Or from the ones who looked like they could afford to lose a few pounds, but trying not to be too obvious which morsels she stole away. Later, when Sona had grown bored with wandering the decks, and going into open doors here and there, she climbed back up to five. That’s when she noted that Rogers and Eskandar were frozen at the far end of the corridor, looking grim, having emerged again from the turbolift. 

And Mr. Kyle was finally coming out of the transporter room, so she could slip in past him, once the doors had gone wide enough. She felt she needed to study the controls again, though she’d had hours to do it the last time. 

Later she found a computer tablet in her explorations of the ship, and was trying to make sense out of the reports on it, when Kyle and a new squad of security men, led by Lt. Haines, slowly appeared in the crack in the automatic doors. Her first impulse was to get up. But, if nothing else, she had learned to wait. At long last, and looking very determined, the security detail was more or less in the room, and seemed to be heading to the lenses.

And then it was too late to get up.

The pair of young women security team, Rogers and Eskandar, came running at full speed in from the corridor, their phasers out, and looking very stern indeed. They burst through the frozen members of the landing party, still entering the transporter room.

“Get up, get up!” Rogers ordered, for she was the one Sona had pushed, to get free of them both (what seemed to her to be) an hour ago. 

“How did you get up to speed?” Sona wondered, as they pinned her to the wall.

“It was in our memory banks from twenty years ago,” Eskandar said, very intensely. 

“They we can save my father together!” the Scalosian said.

“You’re going to the brig,” Rogers snapped, pulling her away, and through that knot of frozen crewmates slowly crossing the room.

“You’ve done your job and captured me. Now show some gallantry, and un-capture your captain!” Sona urged them. “You’ve got the element of surprise on your side, why don’t you use it?”

“That’s not part of the plan,” Eskandar said, backing off slightly, for her nose had begun to show signs of frostbite, glowering up close at the Scalosian.

“You’ve got plenty of time,” Sona wheedled, turning her eyes to the others, to the human statues who’d just now shown the first signs of stepping on to the transporter pads. “You can do both!”

“Fine, let’s get you to the brig first,” Eskandar said. The two young security women hustled her toward the door, but they still had to get through the last frozen tangle of the landing party. Sona made a break for it, but Rogers and Eskandar were only twenty feet behind her, and they all went racing down the corridor.

A phaser blast, and then another, crawled down through the vertical tunnel above her, as Sona slid down a gantry ladder, and a corridor that led to another ladder, and eventually to engineering. All three of the young women easily outran the sizzling green phaser bolt. From there it was a quick dash to the next ladder, though some guy in a jumpsuit was blocking the way, and preventing another phasers shot, as Sona climb back up a half-a-deck, and wait for a turbolift, which was no better than the brig itself.

But at last she could see out under the saucer section, and the brilliant, blinding light of the ship’s biggest phaser banks lighting up just ahead of her, out of the forward-most portal, on the port side of the navigation beacon. In a moment the blast would be too bright to look at.

“Hey, I’m over here,” Sona yelled, surprising even herself, by the lift entrance. Both of her pursuers came racing out of the ladder tube, as the blinding light of the main banks flared like a supernova. She crawled between them, and feeling for the doorway as their arms flew up to cover their eyes. A long microsecond later, the automatic polarizers in the glass blacked-out the energy burst, but too late.

When the security officers came rushing back up to the transporter room, the ship’s first phaser blast was still reducing the Gideonite dish antenna on the surface into a slab of magma. Sona was trying to remain hidden, standing behind one of the landing party members on a back pad, as their bodies began to dissolve in a swirling scaffold of light. Mr. Kyle was stock-still at the control panel, as if photographed in an awkward moment of glancing down at the readings.

In a brief but grave moment of indecision, the two ensigns watched, unsure if there was any point in grabbing an escaped prisoner out of an active beam, or simply diving in with her. But, like Mr. Spock, attempting to bargain with Tabar from the bridge, no one had taken them seriously either.

“Come on,” Rogers grumbled, and up they went, next to two armed men in front, frozen and unaware on the pad. Somehow, Rogers and Eskandar had avoided the temptation to get closer to their escaped prisoner, lest she run again, a-frighted in the middle of transport. It was still a long, unnerving test of character: watching yourself disappear, bit by bit, for a good ten minutes, like the impossibly slow weathering of a statue in the wind and sun and rain.

“Clearly,” Tabar was saying, as he paced around the tent-like room, “you think you can come here and force your will on us.”

“That was twenty years ago, and it was in answer to your distress call,” Kirk explained, for the fifth or sixth time. For this was the essence of prisoner negotiation (even when the negotiator also happened to be the prisoner, himself): never let an accusation or false statement go unchallenged, no matter how many times they came at you with it.

“But now!” Tabar wheeled on him, accusingly. 

“The first time we came out of love,” Kirk sighed, trying to stay relaxed in spite of a burgeoning headache. “The second, as a reckoning.” 

“So you are the one who feels betrayed!”

“No,” Kirk corrected him, mildly. “I’m just surprised you didn’t take better advantage of your opportunities, when you had the chance.”

“Master Tabar,” a metallic male voice came, through a grate somewhere in the room, and Tabar strode purposefully toward a hallway table by the door. He pressed a button, and heaved his chest with a sigh, like a boxer who’d gone back to his corner of the ring between rounds.

“Yes, what is it,” he replied.

“The starship is attacking our matter transmission center.”

“Fire back immediately.”

“Yes, Master Tabar.” Tabar seemed to be having a headache now, for the human had certainly not given him a moment’s pleasure during the interrogation. He paused, his eyes surveying an invisible horizon, and turned back to Kirk.

“And now you attack us,” Tabar nodded, as if it were the final straw.

“My first officer is rather famously non-violent,” Kirk shrugged. “I can’t explain it. Except to say you almost certainly shot first.” Really, there could be a hundred explanations, but that seemed the most obvious.

“I suppose you weave from one interplanetary disaster to the next, leaving ruin and destruction everywhere you go,” Tabar summarized, in the center of the room. His hands and arms balanced like the uncertain scales of justice, careening one way and then the other. The captain of the Enterprise had to admit, it was an amusing picture, long arms and legs twisting abstractedly in mock stumbling. 

“Even walking itself,” Kirk smiled, “is no more than controlled falling.” But the next moment passed in silence, for it seemed there could be no more understanding between them. Finally, Kirk spoke again, for he knew his mission.

“But when we hold one another up, the fall is rarely fatal.”

“I refuse to believe that intergalactic peace is no more than two drunks, walking each other home as the sun comes up.”

“But it is a poetic image,” Kirk said, encouragingly.

“And if they decide to… rob a bank as they tumble along?”

“Where I come from, we take turns being the village policeman.”

Tabar nodded, unconvinced.

And with that, the six visible security guards materialized in the room, two nearest Tabar spinning together like cogs in a machine, sweeping him into the center, where he was surrounded. Not wanting to be the only one lounging around, Kirk rose from the little chair.

Just as suddenly, a couch and table were flung upside down and Rogers and Eskandar materialized in that buzzing blur, with Sona pinned underneath. Each security guard carried with her a small empty vial. And, it seemed, a lot of grievance.

And though he could never really compare himself to everyday parents, in that moment he seemed to have discovered a new sense of embarrassment, over having a son or daughter brought home by the police. Made worse by the fact that he was, in this case, also the mayor that particular city in the stars. And by the fact that he was trying to set some sort of good example, which now presented an entirely different set of problems for him personally.

“So,” Tabar folded his arms with a great deal of satisfaction. “First you bring your disease of the flesh; and now your disease of the mind, as well.” He seemed to be referring to the sudden appearance of an unladylike wrestling match in their midst, as the security women hoisted Sona to her feet.

It was just as likely, to Kirk, that it happened to be an extremely literal illustration of his “drunks leading one another home” analogy, after some momentary stumble. But Tabar’s offendedness made any kind of understanding impossible.

The door to the hallway opened, and eight phasers pointed in that direction all at once. The guards on the other side of the threshold hastily withdrew, and Lt. Haines shut the door again. The captain of the Enterprise pulled his daughter out of the possible exchange of fire, across the invisible line toward the door, before speaking to the Gideonite ruler again: as if nothing at all had happened that was in any way out of the ordinary.

“And what is the disposition of your armed vessel in orbit,” Kirk said, slipping back into courtroom mode, as though he were the sentencing judge, considering one final point before conviction. Moments ago, he was merely a drunk whom Tabar had pulled in off the street.

The Gideon master’s anger seemed to melt, for there was no more point in bravado. “It is a matter of no concern to us,” he said, of Amar’s escaped brothers and their ship.

“The first time we came to you in friendship, but it seemed you were maddened by fear and desperation,” Kirk said, not wanting to make a speech, but it did seem inevitable. “Now we find something worse. Maybe you were poisoned by hopelessness, and a destructive adherence to a system you inherited, one that finally betrayed you. Very badly. Possibly through no fault of your own. I can only pray your… momentary hopelessness… was not from my own hand…” And now he found himself turning to reckless Sona, “or from my own blood.”

In that moment, the princess of Scalos felt a new sensation. She was back on her feet, but her hands were pinned behind her back with rubbery restraints, and the renewed blue steam that was her veil burned her eyes. She felt disgraced before her father (though he was talking about his sons, in this case). And now she seemed headed toward some unpleasant fate as well.

“I was trying to save you!” Sona said finally, when the two were back in his cabin alone.

“I’m not France!” Kirk said with a comical flair, to the girl in the cape he had given her.

“Stop doing that,” she said very quietly, and downcast.

“You’re right,” he shook his head, conceding at his own foolishness in the matter. “Thank you for trying to help.”

“It doesn’t matter, it’ll never work,” she sighed. “I’m just some spark flying off a fire that burns at its own pace.”

“It’s all right,” he said, sitting down by her side. “You just have to keep that spark alive, till it… lights up the sky.”

She nodded as if that had helped, a little. And then he wondered, privately, if all her little ‘hiccup’ like slowdowns in speech were really just Kirkian pauses.

“There are all kinds of psychographic aptitude tests out there, to suggest what you might be happiest doing,” Kirk said, looking across the cabin, at no particular corner or shelf. “But first you have to save yourself… before you go out and save France.”

“Ah, yes, France,” she said, for she had read about it in her spare time. His words filled her with a sense of hopefulness.

“Yes, a country that fiercely insisted on being different from every other.” Of course, he had to admit to himself, that every country, or planet pretended to do this, with varying degrees of success. But to do it with a flair for beauty, and to find the beauty in others, was purely au francais…

“And she destroyed herself?”

“Oh no,” he laughed, “it’s still France! Stylish and no-nonsense and in-touch with their souls. They practically invented the brand of diplomacy I use every day. You can accomplish a lot, with a smile, and a little flirting.” He paused, and began again, a little more charmingly himself. “Maybe you should just try to save that bit of France within yourself,” he added, hoping he hadn’t sounded completely ridiculous.

“It’s a little hard to live one’s life as France, as a metaphor for something else,” she said, feeling hopeless again.

“You have to have a million stories to cheer yourself, and a million fiddlers in your orchestra,” Kirk said, spreading one hand across the table, expressively, like a conductor. “That’s what a sense of identity is.”

“I’m going to need more fiddlers,” Sona said, before thanking him, and going back to her own cabin for the night.

“Bridge,” he said, now that he was alone again. 

“Scott here,” came the voice from the top deck, through a speaker in the ready-room side of his quarters.

“What’s the status of that other ship, Scotty.”

“We may have to bring them all on board anyway,” the chief engineer sighed, a bit defeated. “The ship suffered some sonic disruption before we got between.”

“Understood,” Kirk said. “Set course for Mikhos IV.”

“Course plotted, laying it in, sir,” the other man said, sounding every bit as resigned to his duty. In this quiet moment, Kirk could admit to himself it all seemed just a show.


	7. Chapter 7

There was an air of celebration among the 69 young Kirks, and Amar who joined them in the shuttle bay after his release from the brig. They were all quite awe-struck by the Enterprise, as if a love of this particular ship had been bred into them.

“Surprised, Spock?” McCoy and a team of medicos were standing up on the observation level, above the bay. They were waiting to go down and do quick physicals of the rather obviously all-too-healthy young men.

“By the number, or by the nature of our new arrivals, Doctor?” Spock replied, also looking down on the boisterous crowd.

“Take your pick,” McCoy said, as playful fighting broke out below them on the crowded hanger deck. Like schoolboys at an air museum, they crowded around warp-driven shuttlecraft, or marveled at the view through the portals, to the outside. Till now, one young daughter seemed like plenty to handle for James T. Kirk, and the crew of the Enterprise. This was, obviously, an order of magnitude beyond that. And these weren’t girls. 

A long line of empty space-suits lay along one side of the bay, where they’d been left once the great hanger had been pressurized again. Amar wore a drab orange jumpsuit, like a prisoner, but his brothers looked extremely robust, clad only in white onesies, which they’d worn beneath their space gear.

“Have we given any thought to the over-population problem they’ll bring with them, onto this ship?” Dr. Chapel asked, folding her arms, as if it were any defense at all for the average woman.

McCoy could see the captain below them, in a knot of men thirty three years his junior. It was just a few years after the death of David Marcus, and somehow James T. Kirk seemed to be soaking up as much filial affection as he could possibly absorb. As if he intended to be recompensed all at once, for past sorrow.

“Normally,” Kirk was saying (or shouting) across to Amar, down in the vast expanse of the hanger floor, “in any big war story, you’ve got your city kids, and your country kids, and your ethnic kids, and your minority kids, and your dumb kids, and your smart…” He trailed off, for it was a remarkably homogenous group all around him: all looking like Iowa farmboys, a thousand light years beyond Iowa.

“I’m the smart one,” Amar said, with a confidential gesture, between them, though his voice could easily be heard above all the others.

“Are there any more, down on the planet, brothers or sisters?” Kirk asked, though it seemed absurd.

“None that want to leave,” Amar said, as if suddenly weary of the topic. “And of course many did not survive the virus.”

James T. Kirk climbed up the back of one of the shuttlecraft, and stood above them all, to address the noisy group.

“I apologize for these living conditions, but I see you’re… accustomed to hardship,” he began, his eyes wandering across the long line of spacesuits on the deck. There was polite laughter.

“It seems like there are seventy of you,” he continued, “and I’d like to split you all up into three groups, of—I guess— twenty-three each. Obviously one person gets left out, or one group gets an extra man. My first thought is that Amar can coordinate between the three groups, and each group can have its own small group of two or three leaders. I don’t want to force anyone into a leadership position on this, or force a leader upon you. But my honest feeling is that, sooner or later, who ever gets… injured… first should then take over the intergroup coordination from Amar, because it amounts to being a more… bureaucratic position, anyway. Does that make sense?”

There was general nodding and shrugging and “yes sir’s.” The proposition also had the effect of emboldening the boys, that some exotic new battle might present itself.

“But the point is, you’re all energetic young men, and I feel like I have to keep you busy, and keep you out of trouble, and— somehow— prepare you to go out and do good in the universe. I have complete faith that you are more than equipped to be… a force… for good, for yourselves. And for anyone in need.”

And, just like that, he had acquired an army of sons.

Mikhos IV was not that different from most other colonies, a lovely, unspoiled Class M world, not yet self-endowed with hunters or gatherers, but with plenty of things to hunt for, and to gather, just the same. The sky was a deep blue, perhaps a bit of a disappointment for travelers who’d come from Earth, expecting something a little more other-worldly; and the mountains and trees and streams and prairies, visible on the horizon. It was all like something out of a 19th Century painting, vast and sweeping under a fresh breeze. It’s where you’d have sent your mother, if she yearned for a taste of the old pioneer days. If she didn’t mind being out on the absolute fringe of Federation space.

“You’ve traveled so far,” the welcoming committee must have said, three or four times, after Captain Kirk and his team (including Sona and Amar) materialized on a frontier-like town’s square. “So far, so far,” the colonists seemed to echo, as if cherishing the grit and tenacity that had also brought them too, to this world. As if it were group therapy, of some kind. The colonists’ clothing resembled simple farm attire, coveralls and thick twill and flannel. Some charming innovations had crept in, since they were established, fourteen years earlier— some of the women sported ribbons woven into their sleeves, and the men’s sideburns had grown long under their sun-hats.

A team of doctors and nurses materialized a minute after the landing party, after Kirk and Spock and McCoy and Scotty, and Amar and Sona had all stepped off the invisible coordinates, to shake hands and exchange names and greetings. The medical team settled visibly onto the ground, as if their hips and shoulders had been the last to regain their molecular cohesion, and sunk, ever so slightly, down onto their knees and hips once more. Or perhaps they were simply forcing themselves to relax on the face of some new world, after a twinkling moment of non-existence. The sickbay crew spotted Dr. McCoy, from the first group, and he joined them on a tidy dirt road, between simple wood-frame storefronts. The whir of tricorders filled the air. And finally, behind them, the first stacks of supply crates began to materialize as well, eagerly hauled away by the younger colonists.

Mikhos IV was run by a Dr. Ingrahm, a pleasant, thoughtful woman about Kirk’s age. She soon led the first landing party down the street, pointing out this building or that, and toward where they first landed, and all the usual sites: where the first birth had occurred, and the first death. The things that made life real to them, on their own new world.

“It’s so lovely,” Scotty nodded, though his eyes seemed to sweep over the moor-like grasses and rocks and hills beyond, after first gazing at Dr. Ingrahm. The innocent flirtation, on Scotty’s part, was greeted by a kind of twitch: a funny, startled blink from the colony leader, who quickly changed the subject.

“I don’t know… how up to date we are,” she resumed her informal tour, walking again, and the others followed. “There are nearly five hundred of us, with the latest births, earlier this week,” she added, with a hint of a joyful catch in her voice, for the ups and downs of a population count were exceedingly important, this far out.

“That’s wonderful” Kirk nodded. At this rate, he supposed, the landing party would most likely be remembered for its automatic pleasantries, once they left. Although the tone had already been set the minute they landed, with the gentle cooing of the colonists pressing in to shake hands. And the tendency of humans to simply “blend in,” even among Starfleet officers, was hard to get around, especially in new surroundings. But while there was no chalkboard figuring to support it, he was beginning to think there was something else in the air.

“What’s that you’re breathing,” Ingrahm asked of Sona, when they happened to be walking together, after a few more stops on the grand tour. 

“It’s to slow me down,” Sona explained, “I tend to dash away, I suppose,” she added, as if she might run across the field, like a startled rabbit. And, of course, she was still uneasy around a lot of strangers who weren’t just lying there in cryogenic tubes.

“Oh, dear me,” the colonial leader nodded, furrowing her brow.

“It’s just natural for me. It’s nothing traumatic,” Sona smiled unevenly, for she realized it might sound like she was conjuring an image of something horrible and excruciating, in her natural self-consciousness. Or maybe the nearly neglected colonists were just listening too closely, desperate for something new. Inwardly, Sona cringed at the notion that she’d scrawled an entire rosetta stone out of her casual conversation, to be gravely deciphered by some alien race.

“Well, we try to keep it very relaxed and reassuring down here,” Ingrahm laughed again, but just exactly like the last time, it held a kind of pity or sadness, present at first sight of the strangely clad younger woman. As if she must be protected for her difference. Meanwhile, Kirk fell back alongside his boldest son.

“You’re being very quiet,” Kirk remarked to Amar, a few steps away, in his somber orange jumpsuit.

“I feel like I’m in a library, or a museum,” he whispered, and Kirk chuckled.

“Well, you are the smartest.”

At that, Amar laughed, to be spoofed. It seemed like a perfect walk in a quaint little settlement, the older people focusing on the young, like tender seedlings.

“So how did you survive on Gideon, if Tabar was so against you?” the father asked the son, as the entourage climbed a smooth dirt road, up a hill, into a forest.

“We held a disputed region to the north. And as long as we were out of way of the reorganized government, they usually ignored us.”

“Then why leave?”

“They stopped ignoring us.”

“Ah.”

“It became a question of absolute loyalty, or…”

“Of a people who would behave like a machine, under the hand of a lazy, fearful ruler,” Kirk nodded.

“Yes sir.” Amar struggled to find the words, being unfamiliar with an all-too-familiar scenario, for an Earth-born human, where the tiniest threat became an all-consuming madness.

And when Amar had painted that picture for him, Kirk wondered which was better: a son like this, who needed a father to look up to; or a son like David, who was by nature determined to find his own way. And who had rebelled himself, and lived his own fiercely independent life, even to a noble death.

A sudden shuffling on the dirt road broke his reverie. All at once, the colonists had managed to surround the landing parties, and were aiming pitchforks, spears, and even a few old-style phasers in toward the Enterprise group, at the top of the hill.

And the next thing they knew, Amar was shoved into a jail cell, and Kirk was left pleading his case before colonial leaders. Spock, McCoy, and Scotty sat with Sona, against a wall behind him as he spoke.

“Who stands against Amar,” Kirk reasoned, already whipped-up. Having children was exhausting. “Who is offended by his conduct?”

Dr. Ingrahm looked stonily at him, flanked by two older colonists at a simple wooden table. The only problem with simulating the Western frontier in colonies was the association with frontier justice, sudden and irrevocable.

“It sounds like a very serious case of sexual assault, Captain,” she said at last, looking down at her tablet screen, which included fresh video of Sona discussing her attempt to follow Kirk onto the rebel ship over Gideon, which led to her capture by Amar.

“Sona boarded their ship without permission. She had the advantage of blinding speed. They only wished to subdue an intruder as quickly as possible,” Kirk said, trying not to jab the air with impatient hands.

“No man has the right to attack a woman that way,” Ingrahm said, quietly but deliberately.

“It’s not even your jurisdiction,” Scotty mumbled, behind the captain, for his feelings had changed toward the colonial leader.

“You have thrown this matter in our laps,” Ingrahm said, a bit more loudly now, “in contempt of our planetary code!” Her words were directed at the chief engineer, but her eyes bored into the captain’s.

James T. Kirk rubbed his brow. He looked as though he had been out on the frontier of human reason for entirely too long.

“I would like to bring down the other five witnesses to this event,” Kirk said, playing for time.

“That will not change the victim’s testimony one bit, Captain,” Ingrahm replied.

“Then let us hear from Amar and Sona,” he wheeled back on her, as if he had been hammering away at this point again and again. At least with Tabar, on Gideon, there hadn’t been all this excess crowd to distract him.

“Victim testimony is primary to any sexual assault proceeding,” Ingrahm said, raising her voice above Kirk’s.

“It was not a ‘sexual assault,’” Kirk said, lowering his voice to a calmer tone, through sheer force of will.

“A young man, armed, throws himself down on a young woman, without her knowledge or consent—“ Ingrahm recounted, for the second or third time that day.

“And she was armed with five blasters!” Kirk said, his arms going wide now, for he was the father, and beginning to sound as though Ingrahm was the worried mother.

“Captain Kirk,” Dr. Ingrahm said, making a plain attempt to calm herself now (and, in the bargain, implying he was somehow being irrational), “All woman in this colony— and some of the men, too— are here because they experienced some form of unwanted male harassment, or attack, or worse. And we on Mikhos are devoted to the ideal of changing the galaxy, one case at a time.”

“I respect your desire to heal,” Kirk nodded gravely, though he was struggling for something to say. “But how was Sona injured in all of this?”

“We are all injured on her behalf,” Ingrahm proclaimed, as if he were a little slow to understand. “Our healing ethos is anguished beyond toleration, to have this violence brought to Mikhos IV. Our own healing is set back, and we as a group are healed in healing others! The testimony is clear,” Ingrahm added, leaning back from the table, barely seeming to glance to her left and right, as the other colonists eyed Kirk with dismay. “The sentence is life in our prison mine.”

“I request an immediate appeal,” Kirk said, though his tone seemed to say, “are you out of your mind?”

“On what grounds?”

“You can’t established forced labor based on your own sense of grievance, when the supposed victim herself seeks no claim! That’s against every modern precept of justice!”

“Captain, those mines have been tapped-out for decades,” one of the other elders said, to Ingrahm’s right. “It is not to our financial advantage, or any other, to sentence your son to life breaking up rocks far underground.”

“The ‘claim,’ as you put it, Captain,” Ingrahm sighed, “is the violation of our own territorial charter, against sexual violence of any kind. It is not a question of ‘where’ it happened, only that you have brought it to us in a manner that scourges our souls— a crime in itself, that may require further prosecution,” she added in a deferential tone, though it seemed more of a threat. 

Once again, he tried to appeal to their saner selves: “The pain and attacks we all suffer prepare us to heal others. Not to spend an eternity trying to heal our own selves back to some imagined state of immaculate conception.” A cool silence was their answer back.

“We will take up the matter of your own offenses tomorrow,” Ingrahm said, as if it might be too horrifying to continue on with today.

In a way, Kirk would rather have been alone that evening, now that he was back on board the ship. But Sona sat beside him in the officers mess, and neither one looked happy.

“Maybe you could ask her what it is, in her own life,” Sona said, after a lengthy silence, “that makes this such a crime.”

“I will,” Kirk nodded, calmed by Sona’s reasoning. 

“Does this happen very often?” she asked, though he wasn’t sure what, specifically, she meant.

“Well, every colony is different, they’re not all pure science— you can form a planetary group based on an ideology, but it has to conform to Federation guidelines. I’ve appealed back to Starbase Seventeen for an injunction, but that’ll take days.”

“How odd,” she sighed.

“They’ve just got to save France,” Kirk said, feigning buoyancy. “And, in this case… you happen to be their version of France.”

“Well, at least a part of me,” she shook her head. “The southern provinces.”

Now that he had a daughter, his sense of humor seemed to be dwindling.

“I’m not sure if we’re meddling in their lives, or the other way around,” Sona said, in a surprised tone.

“Well, they’re so far removed from the entire human race, in this rapid, galactic expansion,” Kirk explained, “it’s normal for them to feel… isolated… and their minds seize on any new, foreign moral conundrum with twice as much energy.” It was the most charitable thing he could think of, at the moment. Though conceivably, the same could be said of the crew of a starship, gone for years at a time.

“I suppose there’s an Earthly analogy for all of that,” Sona teased him, standing up to leave, to go back to her quarters. They were both exhausted, and she could probably sleep for a full five minutes.

“No, it’s just everywhere. People need to feel ‘right’ all the time. Preferably in contradiction to anyone else.” 

“I don’t know if I agree with that,” she tilted her chin upward, to make him laugh.

Then, hours later, in the middle of Kirk’s sleep cycle, the intercom by his bed went off suddenly.

“Sir, it’s Haines in Security. The Gideonites are escaping the shuttle bay.”


	8. Chapter 8

Of course, by the time he got into a turbolift it was too late. Mr. Spock’s voice came through the little grill by his shoulder, as the lift plunged downwards to the lower nacelle.

“In our haste, we appear to have beamed back mostly empty suits, Captain,” the first officer said, sounding annoyed at being outmaneuvered. “And in the time it is taking us to clear those empty suits off the beaming platforms, an additional number of suited Gideonites have escaped the Enterprise. They are descending now, into the stratosphere of Mikhos IV. The intense heat and turbulence of reentry makes it impossible to beam them back aboard.”

“Understood,” Kirk nodded. The first batch of space-suits had been thrown out of the bay as decoys. Now the transporter officer was pulling each one off the platform, before any actual Gideonites could be beamed back.

“Will advise when we have their planetfall coordinates.” That should have been fairly obvious, the captain riposted, silently.

“Kirk out,” he said, forming a plain, flat sentence in spite of the exponentially mounting outrage of it all.

The shuttle bay re-pressurized, and a phalanx of red shirts led him through the airlock. He glanced leftward, astern, at the big curving hanger doors. They superficially appeared to be undamaged. It was obvious that Amar’s orange team had taken up the rescue mission, for the other two groups were still aboard, under the steady aim of a security team’s phasers. They sat like prisoners against one long wall, staring fiercely ahead.

“Looks like they pried apart the doors, and jammed them open with one of the helmets, after pushing the guards back into the airlock passageway,” Haynes said quietly, as she followed him to the center-line, and waited for him to make the inevitable remarks to the long row of grown boys.

First, he paced past them, as if they simply didn’t exist. Then he paced back the other way, to make it clear they were now beneath his contempt. 

“What your brothers have done,” Kirk’s voice filled the hanger space, “I could have accomplished much more simply, and with a much greater assurance of safety and success, using something called ‘paperwork.’ Something called ‘bureaucracy.’ Something called ‘patience.’” His voice was dry and tinged with sarcasm, though he had no one to blame but himself for their daring and valor.

If there was any impulse to giggle from among the post-adolescent Kirks, it was squelched in their chests, though it may have come out in a faint squirming along the cold hanger wall. Their faces reflected a mixture of excitement and dismay.

“Who will speak for you now,” he demanded, turning to them at last, as if there could be no rational defense of this matter. One of the young men stood up after a moment, and approached with his head lowered.

“What’s your name, son,” Kirk said, automatically, for this was a common form of address, between senior and junior military men. He immediately regretted it.

“Yes, father, I am called Connaught. Please forgive us, we have worked so closely for so long, to stay alive and now we are blessed to find refuge on board the noble Enterprise.” His voice was quiet and urgent, and Kirk knew right away it had all been planned out in advance.

“And you reasoned, among yourselves, that a show of strength was required, to free your brother.”

“Yes sir.”

“And even now they plunge down a superheated friction, to crash upon the hostile planet below.”

“It is a statistical possibility,” Connaught agreed immediately, “but our rocket packs were designed to allow full descent survivability, sir.”

“Designed by whom?”

“By me, sir.”

Kirk nodded, impressed, but still inclined to simmer. The whole thing was so outlandish. And yet an impulse toward hysterical laughter flashed across his soul. He did not reveal the sensation in any obvious way.

“And they will use their rocket propulsion to land at the colony,” Kirk nodded. It was hideously easy to understand them all, for some reason. For this was their Kobayashi Maru. A string of self-lacerating obscenities raced through the captain’s mind.

“Yes sir.”

“And then attempt to overtake the jailers, and free Amar.”

“Yes sir.” There was the usual numb silence, between parallel universes, that could not be reconciled by reason.

“Are you out of your minds?” he exploded, turning on Connaught.

“Quite possibly. The strain of a lifetime of exile and oppression—“ the young man began, looking off past Kirk’s shoulder, at some invisible medical chart, at the foot of his own hospital bed.

“On my planet,” Kirk said, loud enough to cut him off, “we have something called a ‘rhetorical question,’ which does not require any answer. The answer to a ‘rhetorical question’ is always embedded within the question itself.”

“Yes sir.”

“And Sona was the one who informed you of Amar’s imprisonment?”

There was silence. Connaught was a quick study.

“And, in fact, Sona is among the descenders at this very moment?”

Again, silence.

“It’s okay to answer,” Kirk said, leaning toward him with a kind of urgent whisper; though he could feel his eyes protruding out of his skull, in Connaught’s direction.

“Yes sir.”

“And can we communicate with them at all?”

“Of course,” Connaught shrugged. There was an angry silence, on Kirk’s part.

“So you’re saying we can reason with them, and even stop them.”

Connaught squinted back at him, as if that might, possibly, be another rhetorical question.

“From now on,” the captain said, walking past the young warrior and scientist, to address the rest of his Gideon sons, “you will consider that every word you speak, whether aloud or in private, will become part of a new legal document, outlining this matter for future official deliberation. 

“And after I am rid of you—“ he let that last phrase echo through the hanger— “you will be remanded to the authorities at the nearest starbase.”

Even Kirk’s own eyes stung at that, and he knew he was going to say it beforehand. It was a declaration of arrest. Finally he turned and walked aft to the big hanger doors, to look for damage, like a father after prom night, inspecting the wreckage of the family car. His head bobbled slightly as he walked back to the smaller airlock doors after that: all sorts of words booming in his ears, from the inside. He went to the bridge, to follow the progress of the daring rescue.

The main viewscreen showed about twenty shapes in formation, like missiles, racing across the clouds above Mikhos IV, and trailing twenty lines of white cooling vapor. Even with the armor plating, they were too fragile to grab with a tractor beam, and no one had any interest, on board the starship, in shooting them down. 

“Open a hailing frequency to the… escapees,” Kirk said, pausing to choose his words carefully.

“One moment, sir,” Uhura nodded, still searching for a video channel. Then, “On screen,” she added, as if it were nothing at all.

There, across the width of the main viewer, was an inside-the-helmet picture of Sona, shuddering in the turbulence, looking as if she’d finally caught her second (or third) wind in this wild ride.

“This is Captain Kirk,” he said, leaning forward. “Break off this unauthorized excursion, and land immediately. We will beam you back on board as soon as your flight is ended. One way or another.”

“The unjust imprisonment of any man,” Sona said, as she was being rattled around inside the heavy metallic suit, “imprisons me as well!” Either she was misquoting John Donne, or putting all her spare time to good use, thinking up her own new philosophies… Either way, everyone’s great love of idealism would destroy them all.

“But you’re the one who put Amar in a jail cell,” Kirk argued. “Why not just go down there and apologize for creating a misunderstanding?”

“It’s not my misunderstanding!” Sona called back, squinting hard against the violent turbulence.

“And it’s not their assault case,” he stammered, before calming himself again. “Let’s assume it’s my misunderstanding,” Kirk said, as if blame made any difference at all. “I’ll go down before you and apologize for the whole mess.”

A few minutes later, he was knocking on Dr. Ingrahm’s door, on a darkened stoop, on a wooden sidewalk, in the middle of the night. The moon above was very nice, darker than Earth’s, but casting a soft reflected glow down through the trees, to lend a romantic overtone. 

The governor appeared, looking only slightly alarmed at the sight of him. She went about preparing hot tea, and they sat in the front room of her home and office. He explained—as calmly as possible— about the twenty or more young people streaking out of the sky at that very moment.

“It’s a terrible misunderstanding,” he insisted again, though nobody else seemed willing to take the blame for it. Amar had been defending his ship, escaping Gideon; and Sona had been trying to support her father. And this, to Kirk, was threatening to become another show-trial, no matter how virtuous its reasons. 

“Perhaps we have turned our idealism into a vanity, Captain,” Ingrahm said, though it gave her no pleasure. And it meant nothing, spoken in private. She was just synthesizing what he’d been trying to say before— which, if nothing else, showed good political acumen.

“As the grown-ups, we have to tell them this, ourselves,” Kirk said, as if pondering the next step. He waited, while she looked into her teacup. The moon shone stony blue, coming through the windows, reducing everything to a kind of stark quietude. And yet, in the simplicity of the room, it became the most romantic lighting of all: it gave him the sense that they’d sat like this on many a night.

But all he could afford to think about was the Gideonites streaking down upon them at any moment. He tried again:

“How will you respond, when they arrive?”

“If they try to free the prisoner,” Ingrahm shook her head, at being placed in an impossible situation, “we will have to subdue them, and arrest them.”

“Well, that’s one thing, when there’s just one person to arrest,” Kirk countered, quietly. 

A second later, there was a sound— like several inches of snow, sliding off from a rooftop with a whoosh! It was the spacesuits far overhead, and his children inside, firing their last bursts of reentry boosters over a nearby valley. At least they weren’t coming in for a hard landing right there in the village square. Though he might have tried that, himself, thirty years ago.

“We’ve had a lot of time to work up defenses, so far out on the frontier, Captain,” the colonial governor said, as if she were passing along a very important bit of advice, in a roundabout way. It gave him a cold pain in his stomach to imagine his offspring walking into a trap.

“If you could hold the trial immediately, it might avoid a lot of… trouble,” he said, not wanting to throw her into a rage with his own ponderous threats.

She looked at him as if his pleading, or her own self-righteousness, had become a rock on her back. On a nearby computer screen, an automated accounting system offered easy solutions to the flow of goods and services and credits. It was an accounting system cobbled together by some other planet— not the standardized one sent to each new colony by the Federation, as a basic, interchangeable system of localized economics. 

That shouldn’t automatically be taken as a slap against the Federation. A lot of colonies refused, or were at least reluctant to accept a prepackaged bookkeeping from some gigantic interstellar government at first, but generally adopted it, after a few years or decades of trust had built up. But it made the human problems on Mikhos IV seem more complex. Just as they’d re-invented banking and supply chains and all that, when there were so many other challenges to be addressed on the galactic frontier, they also built an entire colony on one purified strand of being. That was probably the whole point of a colony. They didn’t want to be part of their own kind any more. Perhaps she was hearing his thoughts.

“How do we show, then, that we are a people bound together, by our empathy and our outrage?” She shook her head: not because the two things were so vastly different, but because they had become so much the same.

“Share your stories, cherish your stories. Make this a story they will cherish. For the right reasons,” Kirk said, leaning in, quietly, with emphatic thrusts of phrases. His reasoning was urgent and intimate, and he almost felt like he was echoing Admiral Komak’s concept of leaving a story to be proud of, for future generations. They were almost whispering, across a wooden table that seemed a thousand years old. And any lie that might bounce across its hardened grain would strike a sour note.

There was shouting and slamming of doors in the darkness outside, for the attack had begun. His sons, raised in rebellion, had arrived for their brother.

“We are not a people given to speaking of our most personal histories,” Dr. Ingrahm sighed, paradoxically, as both of them looked out the front window. For a colony of sex-abuse survivors, it seemed they were entirely bound together by their shared personal histories. But as Kirk and Ingrahm watched through the glass, the planet’s colonists went rushing out to the landing site, shouting advice to one another, or bolstering themselves with uncertain tactics against an unseen enemy. Their flashlights sent random brightness across the hillside.

Some twenty minutes later, it was basically the exact opposite of what James T. Kirk had had in mind, when the two sides finally came to meet. 

Heavy, clanking metallic suits, steaming with the heat of reentry, had come crashing through the woods like berserkers. And the colonists had shot at them from across the river, with large rocks launched from catapults. The Mikhosians fell back again and again, paralleling the Gideonites in their unstoppable approach.

But everything ground to a halt when the two groups shored up in the town square. There stood shirtless Amar, strung up by his wrists to two stakes in the ground, between Kirk and Ingrahm in the darkness. Behind them roared two bonfires. And the smartest Gideonite looked stunned and outraged in the dancing light.

It was like some harsh alien equation, set out on before them, and the battling sides stopped to catch their breath and solve it. One by one the great round helmets popped off the space suits, revealing the very young men inside, and Sona among them, looking sweaty and disheveled. The brothers could not simply take Amar away, he was completely vulnerable to a stalled sense of chaos on all sides. Even without the bonfires, and the bare-chested figure at the center of it all, everything tended toward the primal.

“Is this what you want?” Kirk called aloud, taunting both sides. “Is this what you do to every man or woman who crosses you? String them up, to banish your fears? Or salve your honor, like savages? What’s most terrible inside us all, is becoming your outer truth.”

The fires behind him crackled like unfunny laughter. But if Jim Kirk was bound to be their devil, yet again, he was going to make it hurt.

“You’ve thrown every thing away, from the old worlds you came from. But you carried one speck of flickering evil with you. The same thing that kept you alive in the hardest times, in your defiance of harsh circumstances. That essence of self-determination— that saved you again and again, when death came knocking, out here in the unknown, in the wilderness— has become your measure for all men. And none of them can live up to what you went through yourself. So all must flee, or die in a pit of your own devising.”

Dr. Ingrahm knew it was her turn to take up the charge, to say something wise and authoritative. But it seemed to her that everything had turned to madness in the dark, as the flames echoed in the eyes of her people, staring back. She felt like she was dedicating a new bridge, but it went to a place she most certainly did not want to visit.

“The universe tests us, every day,” she said at last. “When we are young, it tests us in our powerlessness. When we are old, it tests us in our desperation to hold on to power. I was tested, in my powerlessness, by people who had power over me. It fills me with shame, which in turn became part of their… aura… of power.”

Her words seemed strange, as the fire roared behind her. Kirk wondered if this moment, and the press of desperate people in the dark, was raising a terrible memory, that could lead to unpredictable results. The towering blazes created their own white and yellow raiment, shining through the outermost strands of her silver hair. Was she going to fall back into a chasm of pain and doubt, or assume the same cruel power over Amar, in this new moment, as a proxy for someone from her past?

“We can’t have a future,” she said, looking abashed, “if we only make room for the past.” 

Kirk let her words hang there, between the flames. It was always best to let a woman have the last word. And as far as he could tell, everything seemed to be working its way toward mercy.

“May I speak on my own behalf?” Amar said, breaking a silence. He had specifically been told it would be far more powerful if he just stood there, wrists tied by meter-long ropes to twin stakes driven into this forgettable little planet of an unforgiving nature. In the script Jim Kirk had in his mind, the townspeople would gradually realize—on their own— that these were not nightmarish icons of good or evil, but people leading their own complex lives. 

In the crowd Sona looked on, realizing that she was now the cause of someone else being burned at the stake. Amar’s sinewy frame revealed new light and shadow every time he struggled against the ropes. He cleared his throat, to begin an oration. 

Oh, god no, Kirk thought to himself. This would be the Universe’s punishment for all his own facile rhetoric. But this son was looking far away, for his own idealistic vision, between the wood frame buildings.

“I wanted to say,” Amar began, “that this is insane.”

Oh, perfect, thought Kirk.

“But then,” the young man said, lost in some ironic insight, “I remembered my own planet: jammed full of people. They were dying of being crammed together, billions upon scores of billions, crushing each other, eating and drinking, not from the sun and the water and soil, but just the bare minimum to survive, from laboratories.

“Now,” he took in breath, as if he were seeing things differently, “it’s starting to seem a little more normal. And in a hundred years, maybe it’ll be a little more normal.” 

“But we take life— the creation of life— very seriously,” he added. His torso glistened with sweat, from the proximity of the fires, or from sheer terror. “It changes our women, and puts them into sanitariums for the rest of their lives. One single sexual incident… casts them into decades of bedrest, and eternal pregnancy, and eternal birthing. Many go mad. A thousand years before, we were hunted and preyed on by dragons and monsters, and our mothers were the sole guarantee of our survival, birthing more and more.

“Of course,” he sighed again, not very happily, “my own mother died before she could have all her babies. But her labors continued. She was kept alive, mechanically, to maintain the royal line. Her followers in the court were not so lucky. Many turned against the royal house in their wrath. Surviving pregnancy, like almost anything else, is now a matter of privilege on my world. And death still comes too soon.”

He looked around, not expecting anything to stick in their minds, or soften their righteous indignation. It would have been impossible to tell, the fires cast each face into flickering masks, first tragic, then nightmarish.

“Maybe I’ll die young, and my brothers. But sex on Gideon is not some lovely thing, to gently be cajoled. It is a trembling power. It destroys our mothers, against the wrath of monsters.”

The young men in their steaming space-suits looked older than their unlined faces should allow. The colonists began to fall away, backs turned in the darkness, as the crackle of the fires spoke in the night.

“I’m very sorry about Odona, your mother,” Kirk said, as he untied one of Amar’s wrists from a pole, and Sona and Amar’s brothers untangled the rope from the other. If he’d known that childbirth itself could be some deadly chronic torment, lasting one’s entire life, he imagined he’d have acted differently. Unbound, Amar rubbed his wrists, and tried to lower his arms again. The first trace of dawn softened the mountain ridge behind them.

“It seems… it takes something monstrous,” Kirk said, mostly to Dr. Ingrahm now, “to break through anyone’s sense of right and wrong these days. To remind us that people are pretty much the same, everywhere you go. Until they… insist… that they’re not.”


	9. Chapter 9

“You could have freed him at warp speed,” Kirk said, to Sona, as they stepped off the transporter pads. “Where did you find such calm deliberation, all of a sudden?”

“I couldn’t reach my freezer pack in this suit,” she confessed. “And,” she shrugged, “part of me wanted to see him twist there, a bit like that.” Her slightly wicked smile made her sound like a sister after all. Amar, nearby, had his clothes bundled under his arm, and looked comically aggrieved at the needless torment he’d suffered. He covered up the rest of himself in his jumpsuit, to recover a sense of dignity.

After that, the captain said “goodnight’” to his daring platoon of sons, just now beaming up after the first group, in three phalanxes of six. Many insisted on awkward hugs, in their great metal suits: gaining comfort from him, through heat-proof armor. Of course, halfway through he had the strange sensation that he was simply hugging the ghost of David Marcus, over and over.

The Gideonites went back down to the shuttle hanger, eating two or three dinners apiece, and slept on cots in rows across the deck, for there were simply too many of them to squeeze into crew cabins. Their space-suits had been confiscated by a glum and wary security team. And Kirk rode up to the bridge, wondering how to upraid them all tomorrow, for their spectacular rescue attempt. On the other hand, he would also be able to regale an entirely new audience with the story of his own version of the Kobayashi Maru.

“Long range scanners now returning search results on ‘old-reference' system number 892, specifically the fourth planet,” Mr. Spock announced, from the science station, on the starboard side of the bridge. The graphic down in the corner used the new astrogation tags, which were nine figures long, plus punctuating letters and symbols.

“Proceed at warp factor three,” Kirk said, as a yeoman brought him coffee. A wraith of old feelings and memories swirled up, in returning to the scene of the crime. It was as if he had been granted three wishes, with Scalos, Gideon, and now 892-IV. And each reunion seemed destined to have its own cruel twang. Gideon was no closer to joining the Federation. And there was only one person left from the entire planet of Scalos, and even she didn’t want to live there. So, even if this last world held out the slightest promise at all, the overall mission would be seen as a bitter one.

Of course, the crime had been a violation of the Prime Directive, over twenty years earlier: where his old classmate Merik had told a half-barbaric Roman emperor about the Federation, and Starfleet. And it led to the violent deaths of his crew, and Merik himself. After coming out all this way, probably thirty years ago, to have his ship riddled with holes from a passing hail of debris, and then struggle to find the next habitable world. And then to be sacrificed one by one… Was everyone shattered by space? The plow that broke the field had broken those pioneers.

Or was everyone ruined by the corruption they faced, with their backs against the wall? It was probably a miracle that the Beagle wound up on a class “M” planet at all. The fact that class “M” planets always seemed to be ruined by class “M” people was an entirely different problem. The Beagle made its desperate bargain, and it didn't pay off.

Now we go back, Kirk told himself. Two decades ago, they noted a sort of religious movement stirring to be born, from a movement of ex-slaves. But no sociologists were dispatched by the Federation, perhaps out of a sense of guilt, and to avoid any further contamination. And since the planet had reached its own version of a “20th Century,” it had already become like a single, self-aware organism: gradually developing a cohesive, unified sense of goals and values. And at that point, any outside interference had to be extremely wary. 

And I was the contamination that cleaned up Merik’s contamination, the captain of the Enterprise sighed privately.

But now he was removing that mark from each planet, as he passed through. He was erasing himself, and cleaning up his contamination, adopting his own children back onto the starship. He was only undoing all the damage he’d done to the Prime Directive, in a much slower, gentler way than the crew of the Beagle, which sacrificed itself. When a man becomes too much like a god, he must contradict himself, and find a god-like way to disappear. To complete the godhood.

“Lost in thought, Jim?” It was Dr. McCoy, who had crept up alongside the command chair. If he had said something before that, the captain hadn’t heard.

“I suppose so,” Kirk sighed. “I feel like I’m… picking up my toys from the beach.”

“Well, they all seem like good, solid citizens, so far,” the doctor said, encouragingly, as they watched the long-range report on the big screen. The briefing had begun.

“As you can see, the culture has moved forward in a predictable fashion,” Spock narrated, “including, perhaps inevitably, a rudimentary space program.” ‘Inevitably,’ everyone understood, because of the accidental human intervention. The screen switched from a distant view that allowed the entire “Earth-like” sphere to be seen, showing dozens of satellites in orbit, highlighted by blinking graphics. 

“Previously noted hydrocarbons still a problem, though not as bad as we might expect, based on a much larger population. Scans suggest approximately five billion humanoids on the surface presently, an increase of roughly one point five.

“The level of public corruption seems to be worsening, along with the level of warlike rhetoric and behavior, along what seem to be long-standing conflict lines. Many of the ex-slaves,” Spock sighed very slightly, “now reside on street corners, and in alley-ways, not unlike your own ‘homelessness crisis’ on Earth, circa… 1985.” It was a ballpark figure.

“Mental patients turned out in the streets, dying in the harsh weather, dazed and unequipped for total exposure to the harsh elements.” McCoy nodded glumly, at the familiar parallel.

Spock tilted his head, as the picture changed from piles and bags of household trash, and motionless human beings clothed in rags and blankets nearby, one with plastic bags over her feet, as if waiting for the garbage truck herself. Now the main viewscreen showed towers of steel and glass, and other humanoids walking in and out of them, in a city square.

“There are many signs of wealth and well-being,” the Vulcan resumed, and the picture changed again. “Along with the medical plagues that accompany all strains of population growth, and social rebellion.”

Patients, both male and female, in rows of beds now appeared. Many seemed unable to move, and covered with open gashes in their flesh, as nurses in masks sat with them, chatting warmly; while other nurses seemed to avoid any eye contact at all: dispassionately reading from paper-style charts and graphs above each pillow. Science at work, on overload.

“Just like the 1980’s,” Kirk nodded, feeling as if the temperature on the command deck had plunged thirty degrees. The cruel authoritarianism they’d glimpsed before seemed to have produced a backlash, or social strife, and laid the groundwork for plague. Though, here it seemed to affect both genders equally.

Each scene came with statistics flashing up on the viewscreen, on the right, from the ship’s computers, homelessness, and plague, and faraway wars. At the risk of generalizing, every one of these people seemed to Kirk like slaves, or Proconsuls, or victims of some terrible crash landing themselves. The slaughter continued on different levels.

Spock went on to talk about the rise of a technocratic government, to manage the sudden areas of economic or medical progress or collapse; and the rise of populist leaders to offer simplistic solutions to complex problems. Notably, it appeared computers were not yet becoming a household commodity.

“Economics have risen to something of an art form,” the Vulcan went on, dispiritedly, as if the entire planet had missed the point of civilization, and gone off on a wrong tangent of social problem-solving. “Tens of thousands of people, around this world, gambling with enormous sums of money, on the price of grain, or precious metals, or social schemes, without regard to the value, or sustainability, or the increasing burden on the billions of others at their mercy.”

“But,” McCoy piped up, “if you’ve got enough economists, you can always push the misery off to some other corner of the globe, or some future generation.”

“Indeed, Doctor,” the science officer said, as scenes of great wealth began to contradict the prior scenes of desperation. On the screen, traders in pits, wearing colorful vests with bright numbers, waved their hands in a bidding contest for a field of beans, as if it were a merry game.

“And, the contamination?” Kirk prodded.

“This,” Spock nodded, as if the captain had interrupted at precisely the right moment. On the screen stood an angry young man, atop an old automobile, rusty and trimmed in chrome, with a kind of dark leathery covering on top. 

The resemblance was rather startling: the boy had doe-like eyes, and a stubborn lock of dark blond hair that fell over an unlined brow. His gestures were emphatic, to a crowd in the street, until the police came and took him away.

“Absalom Merikus,” Spock said, fully expecting to be contradicted at any moment by the youth’s real father, less than three meters away in the ship’s center seat.

“Disgraced son of the old order’s first citizen,” the science officer continued, “he rebels against the new government, in and out of jail.”

“The ‘son, from up in the sky,’” Kirk said flatly. McCoy had to look at him, to try and figure out if the captain was brazen enough to link himself to the “son worshippers” they’d met 20 years ago.

“The ‘Son of God’ reference also exists in our more recently collected radio-wave and broadcast data,” Spock said, turning back to the computer, with a mixture of impatience and consternation on his otherwise stoic face. “However, additional information may be transmitted through ‘cable’ news, which is not yet within our reach beyond the system, till we can gain more detailed information from their primitive satellites. And the incipient ‘Christian’ type religion, appears to have been corrupted into something more accurately resembling what you Earth people once called ‘Baal’ worship.”

“‘You Earth people’ covers a lot of territory, Mr. Spock,” McCoy replied. 

“I meant no disrespect to any particular set of beliefs, Doctor,” the Vulcan said, with astringent calm. “On this planet, to have money is a blessing of the Son, and therefore the rich are most closely tied to their god. Not too different from your ‘divine right of kings.’”

“But that was based on a closed-system of economics,” McCoy lashed out, in response to the science officer, as if the surgeon had found himself confronting a more logical Landru, the implacable computer god; or a pointed-eared Parman, the slippery immortal who’d made a crooked Greek paradise for himself.

“The ‘closed economic system’ on Earth,” Spock barely acknowledged the interruption of his lecture, “almost destroyed itself, in a hundred different ways. Half of them based on human religion or other hierarchy.”

Kirk’s attention went back to the screen again, privately looking for more images of Absalom. The visual stream of life on the planet had continued, showing endless signs of suburbia, great mechanized tramways, and agricultural industry. And swarms of people everywhere, in cities and towns and high atop mountains. And sometimes riding animals that looked like great galloping hairy fleas, huge insect versions of llama or small bison. It was a striking reminder that, as Earth-like as things appeared, life here sprang from a different ocean.

On the other hand, at least from his own experience, Kirk knew the women seemed delightfully mammalian. Whether or not that very familiar looking young man on the screen, hauled away by police, was the actual end result of one night with the slave Drusilla, would require a tricorder scan. If they could even find him— or her— again.

One of the two moons had risen, huge and white on the horizon, when Kirk and Spock beamed down to an alley behind an old brick building. The two commanders had been costumed in local Saturday late-night garb, in wild print shirts of bright glossy fabric, and bullfighter jackets, that were too short to cover their waists. On Earth this would have been more of a 1970’s look. But a team of sociologists and their sensor data insisted that this was perfectly normal, for this moment in this planet’s history.

Music pounded from one of the great warehouses, and they walked around to the front. A large, disinterested bouncer took a couple of pieces of paper money from each of them, and the thunderous music shattered the micro-atmosphere over Kirk and Spock’s faces like glass, as they stepped inside.

It was quite a spectacle: hundreds of people writhing and churning to the rhythm, as colored lights flashed across their heads and shoulders on the crammed dance floor. The music drowned out any attempt at conversation that they made. Spock’s face seemed especially grim: his pointed ears, hidden under a wide brimmed hat, were developed to pick up the faintest sound on a desert plain— not for this ground-shaking racket.

Drinks were ordered, once they had waded through a dazed, dancing, scream-talking crowd around a bar, perhaps never to squeeze out again; and more pieces of paper were offered up. So far, this didn’t seem like a planet of economic wizards, to the captain of the Enterprise.

“What?” Kirk asked, in humorous misunderstanding of his first officer, who was merely scanning the crowd with his dark, piercing eyes. Now Spock seemed to be saying something in reply, and fairly loudly.

“What?” Kirk screamed again, as was apparently the local custom. Spock, holding a drink in one hand, raised the long fingers of his other hand to Kirk’s skull, as if telepathy might still work in these outrageous circumstances.

A young man with bird-like plumage on his head, came up and asked Kirk to dance, and with a shrug the famously heterosexual captain agreed, leaving Spock behind at the bar. They couldn’t just hang around together like a couple of vice cops, and Kirk had to start shouting questions of someone, anyone. Soon the Vulcan reached into his vest pocket and produced a glassy monocle, which he put over one eye, becoming even more eccentric-looking, which hadn’t seemed possible till now. With the other hand, he appeared to be scratching his head, under his hat— though he was waking up the tricorder inside.

The people on the dance floor became blobs of heat and motion, seen through the monocle, and the tricorder began reading life signs more and more closely. It seemed hopeless, and Spock began moving to a different position around the perimeter of the room, to see if any human genetics turned up, other than those distinct to the captain: looking for the same iron that ran in his own blood. 

The music ground into Spock’s ears like an augur, like a million harness bells on carriage horses, with hooves that went trampling on his chest. The tricorder held tight on top of his head, though his skull wanted to peel off. Mechanized spotlights swept pools of yellow or orange over the throbbing crowd, as his tricorder swept invisibly through their bodies.

It is as if they are becoming lost in the music, the Vulcan decided, as a scourge to remedy some torment of being young on this particular world. The flashback of battle training at Starfleet flickered through the Vulcan’s memory: terrible explosions, the concussive force blowing at him, till his bones and organs felt like the guttering of candle flames. Afterward, there was usually a strange kind of peace.

Spock pulled the corners off a paper napkin, and pushed them into his ears, which helped a bit. Looking down from the balcony, the dance floor became a churning collection of round groups, their arms thrown up like nearly synchronized fountains of water, in the consciousness-shattering lights. The bits of napkin were, if nothing else, holding the green blood inside of his head. The flashing pools of light, timed to the beat of the music, began to seem like warning signs of a cerebral damage. And he was still not reading anyone that matched James T. Kirk’s genetics, as he sauntered through the inebriates around the upper ring, above the main floor.

And finally, there was a sign of hope, as a smiling, embarrassed-looking young man, the youth from the long-range scans, appeared without fanfare (or, without additional fanfare) in the entry-way, clad in a ragged white undershirt, and dramatic black jacket, and the unmistakable Kirk forelock of sandy blond hair. He may have been even more charismatic than the captain, having had an impossibly beautiful mother.

One of the huge, angry looking bouncers had become fatherly and playful, tousling Absalom’s hair, eliciting a boyish grin. A dozen or so people on the dance floor wiggled through, to pat him on the back or shoulders, or to give him a hug.

Of course, these were the readings Spock had been looking for. He removed the spectacle from his eye, as the need for raw telemetry seemed to have passed. Gradually, he wove his way toward the front of the club, through the laughing tangles of others on the catwalk, and around the zombified late-nighters, sipping their colorful drinks.

White smoke began to creep out of the vents around the dance floor, from under the stair steps as he climbed down. It added texture to the pounding lights, and had a slightly sweet odor. As he watched, a young man in front of him bent in half and collapsed in the smoke, coming up from the risers.

Spock caught him, and hurried him down to the front again, his face stern, and his voice somehow wafting through the impossible noise at one of the guards, explaining that the much younger man’s blood pressure seemed to have dropped off a cliff. The guard, as if both men were caught in a hurricane, began screaming back, conversationally, in his ear.

“We put onjine in the smoke,” the guard explained, or words to that effect. Spock would have to put the monocle back in to inquire about “onjine,” but first he’d have to get the cadet— or in this case, the dance club patron— out to some fresh air.

In any case, once he’d made sure the boy was awake and reasonably alert, Spock went back in. If anything, it seemed the room had changed, had somehow gone “sideways” a bit, the top half twisting in an opposite direction from the floor itself. It would perhaps be due to the onjine, and the smoke was turning to a kind of grit in the air, reduced to mere particles from effect of the pounding beat. And his blood pressure had always been extremely low, by full-human standards.

And now it was impossible to find Kirk or his son anywhere in the group, as even the fellow with the mad feathers blended in to the primal explosion.

Then there was that familiar ‘officer’s training’ moment, in the back of the Vulcan’s head. He felt that he had made a procedural error by going out the front, and was wishing he’d put the monocle back in again, and that he’d not left the dance floor. It was a textbook formula for disaster, when he realized he’d made multiple mistakes in a chaotic situation, all at once.

And then all the music stopped, and the lights went abruptly white and cold and harsh. The remnants of smoke wilted in the air, as if they’d been held aloft by the motion of hundreds of bodies jumping and flailing as one. 

A few people could be heard groaning in dismay, and others pushed their way toward different exits, front and back. Spock was standing close to the front, and the horror of a wall of people funneling straight down upon him in a cattle chute landed like a hot iron.

Cat-like, he clambered up above the crowd, onto a small balcony, knocking over several half-filled, forgotten drinks in the process. A moment later he was up in the lighting grid, where it was ten degrees hotter, dusty and fringed with cobwebs. At his first opportunity, he put the monocle back in, and tagged his captain, clear at the back of the room.

Just as quickly, James T. Kirk seemed to disappear through a back door, black in the black wall, along with a tiny stream of others. The police were coming in through the windows on the upper floor, with a bullhorn to announce a curfew and identity check.

This is not consistent with Earth, he told himself, though he couldn’t think why at the moment. Not consistent with America in the 1980’s, the western or “new world” Earth. Perhaps a bit more Chile in the ’70’s, or Zaire; or Belarus in the early 21st Century. He spied a skylight off to his left, and made his way in that direction, as the crowds were cordoned off like social outcasts down below.

He had already noticed a blinking reminder dot in the monocle’s screen, in front of his eye, and finally tapped the side of the eyepiece to play a message: Mr. Scott, in the command chair, looking grim and frustrated, on the little glass lens. The message was half an hour old, but there would have been no way to hear it under the previous circumstances.

“We’re getting a shut-down message on the warp drive, and I canna get it to clear,” Scotty shook his head. “We’re stuck here, till we figure it out, so take your time, gentlemen.”

This was extremely odd, and not merely because Mr. Scott was so singularly fixated on a smoothly operating faster-than-light-type space drive, on demand, at all times. The only thing Spock could think of, regarding the engine shut-down, called to mind a theory of space-warp that had seemed entirely fanciful. A theory that, at its most extreme formulation, would mean the end of both Starfleet and the Federation. And that’s one of the reasons it was broadly dismissed in the first place.

Of course, Einstein had been right, and nothing could travel faster than light. But space itself could be warped, and vast distances crossed in days or weeks, simulating (in a much smaller way) the matter and antimatter blast that tore at the Universe at inception to, in effect 'go around' the vast distance between stars. But in this galaxy alone, at any given moment, over a thousand vessels were all doing that at once: warping space at different magnitudes of the speed of light, through this arm of the Milky Way, and at least two other arms, every solar day. 

The crank theory, about the tension and strain of warp drive on the fabric of space-time, kept pinging back into his mind, as he navigated the metal rafters over the deathly quiet of the dance floor. As the crowd below was separated into different, isolated groups, Spock felt he was examining a much broader situation from high overhead: all the people, on all the distant planets, reaching out to one another, and suddenly out of reach.

In the early decades of titanium use, the flexible metal was regarded as “unbreakable,” till it was discovered microscopic cracks and flaws did eventually form, through repeated bending and stressing. It was similar to that arcane little thought-experiment, about the danger of warping space, for it had always been assumed that space itself was big enough to “snap back” every time a ship went in or out of warp.

Eventually, even titanium lost its unbreakability. But, as far as he knew, any vast, anguished snapping of the bands of the entire Universe had never been observed, even in a laboratory setting. Now, the engines on board the Enterprise suddenly seemed to disagree.

The science officer wanted to communicate directly with Mr. Scott, and to ask Starfleet for reports of any similar engine shut-downs across the Federation. But that would have to wait, as he crept toward the skylight. And what could he tell the Scotsman? That they were destroying the Universe with warp drive? The possibility would have already occurred to him, and be dismissed as laughable.

Down below, government police were brusquely sweeping those little crowds this way and that. Policing often broke down when the situation became too crowded. But it was dismally quiet, except for the muttered exchanges between people on the very still dance floor. In one group, another young man waved sadly to someone in a different group, ten meters away. It seemed a very long way just now.

Spock had been quietly swinging one leg, and then another, across to a black-painted rafter, when his hat tilted against a dark diagonal metal beam in the shadows. Both the hat and the tricorder tipped off his head, and drifted downward. For a fraction of a second, it was like Galileo’s experiments in gravity, watching the very non-aerodynamic hat twist as it fell like a feather, and the tricorder plummeting down like a rock, in a nearly straight line. Spock hurried across the last few meters.

The device landed with the usual clatter, and then the hat, in silence, as an afterthought. Everyone looked up, in a distinctly human, helpful way. But at the same time (to disguise the noise) Spock had very sharply jammed his elbow upwards through the chicken-wire glass, and brushed the remnants away. A long moment later, glass tinkled with a thin kind of music onto the silent dance floor. Then gunfire broke out, that shattered more glass. Spock was already up in the cool night air, the monocle clenched firmly in his eye, and getting readings from below, as someone picked up the scanner on the crowded floor turning it this way and that.

The second moon had come up, and he ran in the dim light, throwing his legs over an alleyway, landing on the next warehouse over: scurrying half-bent once he’d regained his balance. The monocle was still alive, and he muttered what he hoped would be a readable command. A half second later, inside the thin ring of a miniaturized computer, the monocle shifted back to infrared, and he had a better view of the landscape of rooftops all around. 

All of this seemed strangely inevitable. They had gone through another great humanoid expansion, and with it came the usual charismatic young leader to take authority, one way or another, over all that he surveyed. And now they may have abruptly reached the limits of this phase of exploration. Alexander wept, because there were no worlds left to conquer. Caesar tried to extend his franchise to Egypt, tying Cleopatra to Marc Antony. And Victoria played the marriage game, but it fell apart with even worse consequence: a world-wide war that stemmed from a web of secret treaties, and all traced back to that continental marriage game.

Now, when everything depended on another invisible network, like bands of titanium, instead of bands of gold, the stakes had become unreckonably higher.


	10. Chapter 10

He’d been in so many jail cells, he had a vague feeling he’d been in this one before. The young man with the feathered headdress had been separated from Jim Kirk an hour ago, when the state police filled an entire cell block with dance hall patrons. It was now nearly three a.m., and most of them were sound asleep.

He squeezed himself close to the wrought iron bars, between stone pillars, spaced up and down a dungeon walk with a gleaming floor. The rest of his cellmates, numbering 23, were sprawled side-by-side, and Jim Kirk busied himself examining the inhabitants of the other cells, under the glaring glass light bulbs.

The young bird man, Bellan, had agreed to lead him to Merikus’ son— for that was how he was known here— when the raid descended. And though they’d escaped out the back, they were quickly arrested by machine gun-wielding authorities. Under the New Order, their tunics were black, like their shining round helmets. It did not signal an improvement in community relations.

He didn’t want to stand up, and draw attention to himself from the guard at the end of the hall. But it was driving him crazy not being able to see everyone from this sitting position. He wasn’t in the mood for a rifle butt to the face, so he tried to figure out something else.

Finally there was a rattling of keys and the metallic “boom” of a heavy door opening forcefully around a corner, out of sight. Then the door slammed again with a theatrical flair, waking about a third of the clubbers.

Surrounded by black-clad guards, Absalom Merikus came stumbling toward him, and then past, looking as though he’d been beaten in interrogation. He did manage to keep his head up, which seemed inspiring, given his current state.

“Guard,” Kirk said aloud, as they passed, but he was ignored. What was more important, though, Absalom might have heard, and glanced over. It was hard to tell with that swollen eye.

They threw him into a cell diagonally across from Kirk, and Absalom disappeared into the pile of rejected young people, like a piece of meat, some of the kids with purple highlights in their hair, or yellow, wearing torn clothing, without any other particular sign of living rough. It was some weird amalgam of Earth's 1970's and 80's, mashed together.

Much later, he was surprised to hear someone speak very quietly, behind his back.

“Aren’t you a little old to be here?”

“The fifth visit is free,” Kirk said, turning to look. His heart rose to see Absalom, his face hidden from the light, down under some girl’s painted toenails, in the corner of the opposite cell. He was smiling across at the captain of the Enterprise.

Of course, his first impulse was to say, “better get that eye looked at, ensign.” But that made no sense here. 

“I knew your father,” Kirk said, not unreasonably.

At that, Absalom’s face went blank, or scornful.

“Well, I never did,” the youth said, very quietly. It gave Kirk a strange thrill to think he would soon reveal himself.

“And your mother, Drusilla,” Kirk added, with added importance. At this, Absalom’s expression grew blustery, as if the Earth man had stepped out of bounds. His face went red, going up into his scalp.

“And you waited till now to come to our rescue,” the 892-IV’er snarled. He rolled on his back, resigned from the conversation.

“I’m afraid so.”

One of the girl’s limp bare feet over the rebel’s head slid down a cell bar, and smacked Absalom in his remaining good eye. After a moment, he very politely set the plump little foot aside, trying to make out the exact position of the other one, still propped over his head in a way that suddenly seemed threatening. He couldn’t catch a break.

“I’m James T. Kirk, of the Starship Enterprise,” Kirk explained, after Absalom had regained his dignity, somewhat.

“Is that a band or something?” The boy was trying to focus on that other foot, willing it not to come crashing down like the first. And if “The Starship Enterprise” was a band, his tone suggested, it probably was not a very good one.

“Your… father… saved my life,” Kirk said.

“Well, you’re too late to return the favor,” the boy sighed, from ten feet away.

“I know. I believe he sacrificed himself right here, in this very hallway,” Kirk said, feeling the weight of the moment all over again. “Or one just like it,” he had to admit, looking up and down the corridor. 

Absalom lay there perfectly still, as if sleeping on his back.

“Is your mother doing well?” Kirk asked. 

“Fuck off,” the younger man sighed, his eyes still closed. It wasn’t “fuck off,” but it sounded the same, like a kind of Welsh or Gallic snarl.

Oh, Kirk thought. He thinks I’m a police informant.

And there wasn’t much he could do about it, short of starting a fight with an armed guard, the next time one came through. 

Then, with marching, stomping boots, and clanging of iron bar doors, they were all thrown out onto the street. The New Order didn’t want to pay for their breakfast, any more than the Empire would have, Kirk supposed. He stood there on a bright morning, in those ridiculous discotheque clothes, as people who hadn’t spent the night behind bars, and had had a good night’s sleep, all went swarming off to work in the downtown nearby.

Absalom slunk out with the last little group into the daylight. Kirk felt as though the rail yards, long strands of metal running together in the city center, were just south of here. And in a sauntering way Absalom was headed in that direction. 

“Catching a train?” Kirk asked, when he caught up.

“Just need a little alone-time,” Absalom said curtly.

“I’d really like to see your mother, if that’s possible,” Kirk importuned, nonetheless.

The boy stopped very abruptly, and turned to face him. The distant screech of a heavy locomotive on the metal tracks suggested a tortuous moment, on a bright sunny day. Cars and trucks rumbled along an elevated road nearby. The rest of the world was going about its business with a lot less difficulty.

“Why?”

Kirk swallowed, and gave the honest answer, that he was, most likely, the boy’s father.

“Are you out of your mind?” Absalom exploded, seeming angry once more, or some combination of darker emotions, that made his scalp turn bruised-looking. 

As quickly as he could, Kirk explained the whole story about the Beagle, and one night with Drusilla, and the sad end of Captain Merik: another man in a long line who’d died from a very personal case of culture clash. 

“And you’re prepared, with some evidence, to show that all this is true,” Absalom confronted him, as though he himself were the starship captain, staring down a hapless lieutenant.

Is this how I look to everyone else? Kirk wondered.

“Do you have any idea how much simpler my life would have been, if that were true?” Absalom said, with an unexpectedly bitter laugh.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

And he followed the younger man down an embankment to walk along the metal tracks, which hummed in the morning light, of a century of ghost trains.

“Being the son of Merikus,” Absalom sighed, “even in these days, even today, is supposed to be a high, distinct privilege.” But the way his head lowered, like a defiant animal, said otherwise. 

“I like it down here,” Absalom changed his mood, becoming darkly whimsical. “Lots of rats.” It seemed like a good place for vermin to find food, or to drop off a rail car full of grain.

“If it’s such a privilege, why did they beat you up?”

Absalom laughed again. 

“Why do you prefer rats?”

“They never pretend to be anything else.” 

“And that’s… refreshing, on a planet where there’s so much intrigue,” Kirk nodded.

“Exactly,” Absalom said, strangely pleased, taking a breath, and standing up straighter.

“And you were denied your position as Merikus’ son,” Kirk further supposed.

“You’re good, you should be a soothsayer.” 

“The ‘old order’ fell, but they needed a symbol,” the captain said, trying to peer into another world’s byzantine politics.

“A symbol that wouldn’t rebel,” Absalom Merikus raised a finger of correction, as if explaining a delicate matter of social engineering. He turned and walked, and Kirk walked along with him.

“On my planet,” Kirk offered, “they used to send the young men away, which had the same effect, intended or otherwise, of stopping rebellion at home.”

“Well, to live on the streets, is to be sent away indeed.”

“Don’t they recognize you?” Kirk wondered, about the police. Up ahead, almost motionless, a large train with one bright glaring headlight seemed to be rumbling at them, through a mirage of its own engine heat. But it was impossible to tell with trains, they always seemed to be moving much slower than they really were.

“They recognized me. They probably didn’t want anyone else to,” the boy sighed, half of his face rendered temporarily monstrous.

“Well, if they knew you were only half native,” Kirk began.

“This is my planet,” Absalom turned on him again, with open ferocity. Without intending to, Kirk realized he’d stolen the boy’s self-hood, just as surely as the ‘New Order’ had cast him out.

“You mean,” Kirk said, diplomatically, “the planet of your birth.”

Now Absalom lowered his head again, like a bull, as they came to meet the rumbling train. 

Then it was upon them, and they watched as it went clanging by, and gaining speed. Their clothes and hair billowed in the dust.

“If my father,” Absalom stopped himself, and started again. “If the first citizen really died to save you, you should give me back my life.”

“I don’t have the power to commit my ship, or my people, to change a whole planetary government,” Kirk said.

“You don’t need your ship for that,” the boy answered, quite unexpectedly.

“Aye, I know what you’re thinking, Mr. Spock,” Scotty said, down in the ship’s engineering decks, looking up a Jeffries tube at a distant pair of pointed black boots. The chief engineer folded his arms and leaned against the bulkhead, next to the big oval in the wall, that led all the way up to one of the ship’s two warp engines.

The only energy sounds were the sigh of the ship’s ventilation, and the whir of the Vulcan’s tricorder, as he tried to diagnose the warning light for himself, that had stopped them dead in this system. The engineer, ten decks below, took the very slightest satisfaction in standing on the same cerebral rung of the ladder as the brilliant science officer, even if their chances of ever getting home in their own lifetimes suddenly seemed remote. And, from all the silence, he assumed that Spock had taken no satisfaction in it either.

“‘Course,” he continued, “it might be nothin’ at all. I’d stake my life on the state of these engines.” Even as he said it, he knew he was making things worse. He had put his own scanner down on the straight-line deck, in the lower hull, but could still see its screen, and what Mr. Spock saw from his own monitor: a view of the field shifters that modified the flow of matter and anti-matter through the engines, when they were running smoothly.

“First the hanger-bay doors; now this,” Scotty mused, over the damage to his ship. The doors had repaired themselves, the seal between the two folding halves, re-forming and re-shaping like the butterfly trees of Eif’burlain, a moon over Rigel. There’s beauty in engineering, when it does what it’s supposed to do, just like in nature. They were practically the same thing, to him anyway.

“You know, you’d think someone would have prepared for this eventuality, sometime in the last 100 years,” Scotty added, to no one in particular. Perhaps to the scanner on the floor, like a prehistoric beetle, which is how the entire ship was beginning to feel. Idly, he began to wonder what would happen if one encountered a broken “band” of space-time, while in warp-drive. Would he end up in an entirely different universe? Or just be blown to bits? Then he realized he’d have to model it in the ship’s computers, as it could become a pertinent matter. He had a sneaking suspicion the ship’s navigator, Mr. Sulu’s daughter, was well into her own plan for that already.

And all the while, both Scotty and Spock knew they shouldn’t be focused on the engines at all, that they were just a symptom of a much larger problem, with the engine of creation. Caused, needless to say, by this much smaller solution: the engines that gave them mastery over that. “You’d think the universe would be bigger than that,” as if it had somehow taken offense at their zipping around too fast. But that’s what they used to say about Earth, before climate change forced drastic solutions. As if the Earth, or the universe, were jealous gods.

“I’m gonna get some lunch, d’ya want me to bring ya anything?” he asked, up the long tube.

There was no reply, for this was Mr. Spock, lost in thought. Feeding off his own brain, and devouring a bitter harvest of calculation.

“Well we can’t just sit here doing nothing,” one of the Gideonites said, in the unbearably dull hanger deck. 

“We always say that, and we always get into trouble,” Amar grumbled. Entertainments had been brought down, and lovely yeomen, or yeo-women, more specifically, popped in to chat, and raise their spirits. But the boys, many of them still teenagers, languished like sailors in a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, killing time on a steel beach.

The deck was still available for shuttle transport, if the boys were herded into the airlock. It wasn’t a serious question of readiness, they’d all proved they could withstand a momentary loss in hanger pressure. But the lovely girls who came down on their time-off kept reminding them to stay close to the double-doors on the starboard side, where many a great entrance or exit had been made, by ambassadors, or dignitaries, or thieves. 

In the last days, certain decorative touches had been added. The lights had been re-programmed by Lt. DeContini in life-support, simulating sprays of forest-like color, and sunsets and sunrises, and flashes of birds flying across the great hemispheric “sky” overhead. Sometimes it was a thousand swallows in twisting flocks, sometimes just a single, elegant crane, soaring across. Holographic bonfires on the deck added a tribal touch, and strands of smoke were projected, rising up into the imaginary blue. 

Some of the girls loaned little potted plants from their cabins, and others handed over their own 3-D photos, to adorn the walls. There was a definite air of affection growing, amidst the boxy shuttlecrafts, and the barrels lashed down at the far corner of the deck, and a dozen utilitarian little bathrooms opposite that. It was all very nice, but you can’t tell how long a man can run on empty. Especially when he’s from a strange planet, and most especially when he’s half James T. Kirk.

It couldn’t go on like this much longer, the faces around Amar seemed to say. But, as refugee camps go, it was surprisingly nice. Some of them huddled under metallic blankets, others lay on their cots.

“Do you think there’ll be more like us?” Connaught despaired at the notion— not because the Gideonites were anything special, but because (as a group, sharing similar characteristics) they were so dull, cooped up, without adventure. With nothing to rebel against, without the means to demonstrate their honorable creed. More would only mean trouble.

“Yes,” Amar said, after a brief pause, knowing the captain, and knowing himself. “I’m sure there will be more.”

“How long do you think we’ll be here,” Sona said, not wanting to sound ungrateful. But it had completely changed everyone’s plans, as the great starship was stuck in orbit above this Earth-like planet. Half the time everyone wanted to go down and get some fresh air, and half the time they were gloomy over the fate of the Beagle.

Doctor Chapel smiled at the idea that she was finally having her own sort of roundabout friendship with a variation of James T. Kirk, just as Dr. McCoy had, all these years, with Sona’s father. She never expected that. And, of course, Dr. McCoy never suggested that she was supposed to spy on the girl, the words (in the briefing room) had turned to ash in his mouth, as soon as he’d spoken them.

But Sona required extra medical attention, to balance her life in a kind of walking deep-freeze. And Chapel had seen the recent video of Deela, in that rapid physical decay, following a deeper, more prolonged stasis. The doctor’s eyes darted back and forth between RNA, and even DNA, readings and scans she’d taken over the last week, and the ones she’d taken twenty minutes ago, looking for some advance sign of rapid aging. But, with xeno-scanning, if you didn’t know what you were looking for, and the machine didn’t know what it was looking for, you simply wouldn’t find it, even if it was staring you in the face. 

At least there was that half-human side to look at. So far, on a molecular level, she didn’t seem to need any nano-bots to do their pharmaceutical tuck-pointing, should all her tightly packed double helixes begin to fall apart.

“Any sudden changes? Any gradual ones?” she added, chuckling in the face of a complete mystery. After this latest exam they sat in a little office in sickbay, the usual blue mist rising up around the young queen of Scalos' face. If you just focused on her head and shoulders, and the way she was hunkered down, looking sleepy, Sona seemed both regal and withdrawn. It was not a youthful look.

Chapel watched a screen once again, and the highly accelerated decay of Sona’s mother, on a cellular level. She didn’t turn the picture around to share it with the girl, of course. It would be too disturbing. Though Chapel wondered if Captain Kirk’s own DNA could hold it all together, when her alien genes began to burn themselves out.

In that sense, maybe they were forcing Sona to be too human. If it was inevitable that she’d turn a corner one day, and be a thousand years old, perhaps it was cruel to slow her down, for their own study; and expectations of “normalcy.” And, Chapel thought, if that were true, shouldn’t they just let her live at her own normal, hyper-accelerated metabolic rate, and have a rich, full life among the invisible? 

If there even was such a race, zipping around us like fairies, in the forest of our own mortality.


	11. Chapter 11

“In there,” Absalom said, under his breath, as if anyone could hear.

They were standing across the street from a large government building, forty or fifty years old, with columns and narrow leaded windows behind that. And Jim Kirk crossed the street and walked in, leaving the boy outside. Like nobody’s business. After a moment of astonishment, Absalom hurried to catch up.

“I’m here to see a patient,” Kirk said confidentially, to a lady in the lobby, wearing a name tag and holding a clipboard. She was all starched white apron and institutional black shoes, and examined both males as if they might be patients there, themselves.

“That’s her,” Kirk said, pointing to a name halfway down the list on the clipboard.

“I’ll need to see some identification,” the woman countered, leaning back to indicate that touching the list was some kind of a violation.

The captain produced a handful of beautifully made forgeries from his pocket, and she looked him up and down, suspecting violent tendencies or secret shame on Kirk’s part. Then she turned and walked away, through a large pair of swinging doors. 

Kirk waited till she was out of sight, and dragged Absalom with him, to another door, and off to their right. Now they were just in a long corridor with office doors going down one side, and glass windows on the other, revealing a courtyard with large exotic plants.

Looking puzzled, he stopped at each door, and made a little grimace of embarrassment if someone actually happened to be in there working, before moving on. Nearly all the way down, he dashed into an empty office, and came out wearing a white lab coat with a name tag that read “Oskanally, Hummoll.” Below that were some inscrutable initials, declaring his office and title. Donning an expression of mental insulation, he took Absalom by the arm and they continued up another hallway, and down another. The younger man quickly reasoned that he was to be the patient in this charade, outwardly healthy, inwardly, somehow, deranged. The facial swelling from last night’s police encounter already left him looking a bit unstable.

“Does this name mean anything to you?” Kirk asked, pointing to the lettering on the name tag, as they paused for a moment before going up in a stairwell. 

“He’s a doctor,” Absalom shook his head, not even sounding very sure about that. The young man seemed rattled by Kirk’s own recklessness.

“And you’re my patient. Try to look—“ he was going to say ‘insane,’ but then thought the better of it, considering the years of outrage and injustice visited upon the young man already. He looked closer to 30 than 20, at least in this street-living condition.

“Try to look what?”

“You’re fine.”

“You should probably have an accent,” Absalom added a moment later, considering the name on the tag. He made a choking sound, to imitate the probable sound of Dr. Oskanally’s native tongue, from some ancient, faraway kingdom. Kirk looked at him with an air of concern, as if the boy might be having a seizure.

“If anyone talks to you, just do that,” the captain sighed.

The top floor was organized around another wide hallway, with more highly polished floors, and a very quiet nurses’ station in the middle. There was no one sitting at the phones or desk, and Kirk stepped inside the little bureaucratic corral where he found another white lab coat folded neatly under the shelves. Absalom quickly put that on, following dutifully behind, like a foreign exchange student, looking wall-eyed.

“My name is ‘Denise,’” the boy groaned, when they had paused in the entryway to one of the rooms. Kirk made an imperious, yet strangely convincing choking sound, to cut him off.

“Excuse me, Doctor,” a nurse’s voice said, behind him.

“Oh!” Kirk/Oskanally said, turning, seeming befuddled. “Ve verr luüking voörr Madáme Drusilla’s süite.”

“Oh,” the nurse said, seeming puzzled. After looking at him again, and his newly-adopted air of polite boredom, she nodded and ushered him back out into the hall, and around two more corners, into what seemed like a newer wing, flooded with natural light.

“What kind of an accent is that?” Absalom blustered, as the nurse closed the door behind them, and they were left alone in an empty room.

“I use that on every planet,” Kirk confessed.

Absalom rendered the choking accent again, as if he’d somehow pound it into Kirk’s brain by the simple act of repetition.

Finally, after a long couple of minutes, a sleepwalking figure emerged from the private bathroom, and shuffled slowly toward her bed. Magazines had been spread on the little table by the window, and chairs on either side of that, looking as though they’d never been touched, like the setting of a staged drama.

She still hadn’t noticed them, as she crawled back under the stiff sheets and blankets.

In an instant, Kirk saw the truth at the bottom of everything— that if this was, in fact, Drusilla, she was being kept alive in case of any future question about lineage and status. The New Order must not have had enough reason to kill Absalom, but just enough to discredit him, if the need arose. If he gained power, somehow, she would be trotted out and misquoted as saying whatever they wanted her to say.

Very gingerly, Kirk sat on the corner of her bed, down by her feet, which were drawn up like a baby’s.

“Drusilla,” he whispered. She did not respond. “Please wake up,” he added, desperate not to upset her. She made a faint groaning noise, and nestled further into the bed clothes.

It gave him a grim sense of the natural healing of a planet, or a society, trying to heal itself from outside interference, even at the expense of innocent people like these two. He might never be able to undo the damage of the Beagle or even of his own doing. But in a quiet way, the planet was doing his work for him, taking authority back into its own hands. He was absolved, in a horrible way, of violating the Prime Directive, by the gradual destruction of these two innocents he'd left behind. They were a third class of galactic beings, refugees between the Federation, and the isolated planets that wanted no part of it or them. But it was obvious that someone had to step in.

“I’m so sorry for going away,” Kirk said barely touching the blanket near her hands. “I am the father of Absalom, James T. Kirk.”

At the mention of those names, Drusilla’s body seemed to jerk slightly, almost imperceptibly under the covers, as if something had jostled her in the darkness. Her face adopted a sad, warning quality. Down some long corridor of her own consciousness, she had heard and remembered. And with that tiny motion, she was beseeching them to run away.

For him it was like looking at the scar tissue after manual surgery. Something in her, some basic part of her personality, had been removed by the doctors, and been disposed of, by a government that wished to maintain its own good health.

After that, everyone who could maintain a little corner of security, amidst all the built-in corruption, had shoved her into a sea of moral abdication. In each case, the broadest swath of people were implicitly warned to be callow, and cringing: voluntarily enslaved without the need of shackles. Everything had changed, as long as certain facts were ignored. The only problem with Drusilla was that she was simply too valuable to be dumped out there on the street.

“We can’t do anything for her,” Absalom whispered, his voice choked with sadness. 

“There’s more to heaven and earth than are dreamt of, in your philosophy,” the starship captain sighed. He pulled the communicator out of his pocket, and flipped it open.

“Kirk to Enterprise,” he said very quietly.

But it was too late, for a trio of armed guards burst into the room, and shoved both him and his son to the floor. A faint shriek of disappointment and tragedy sounded from the bed up above.

Spock’s tricorder already lay on the desk between the silver-haired gentleman in a suit, and where Kirk and Absalom stood, robbed of their white coats, on the other side. The ridiculous hat, which Spock had lost along with his device, had apparently been thrown away as the foolish prop it was.

“We are not entirely surprised by your return, Captain,” the older man said. Kirk was trying to recognize him, as he easily could have been from the days of the Old Order. But he seemed unfamiliar, perhaps a younger prison guard, or stage-hand at the combat arena 20-odd years ago. 

“Then you won’t be surprised that I demand the release of the boy’s mother,” Kirk said instantly, with more than a trace of impatience.

“I’m afraid that won’t be possible,” the silver-haired gentleman mused, as if, given enough corridors and beds and guards, anyone at all could become lost just like that.

“And what of the son of Merik?” Kirk spoke as if the boy at his side were merely a hologram, which, as far as society at large was concerned…

“He remains alive to show our… preoccupied sense of mercy, I suppose you could say.” There was an icy silence.

“Many things have changed, at least officially, on your own planet,” Kirk said, gravely imploring him with a forward posture now, and his voice doubly confident. “And doubtless you will ascertain that, by my own longstanding command, and my long journey to return, I have remained fixed and steady, and a lodestar for my people, across the very galaxy.”

The man went strangely pale, up to the top of his head. Kirk had never really put it into words before, and it sounded wildly impressive. The old edict, “know thyself,” could be strangely empowering.

“I ask… only this of you,” he said, brashly: “release the woman now.” And here he glanced meaningfully down at the tricorder, “and I promise no bloodshed, by my own hand.”

Even as an offering of peace, it was horrific. Did he mean he swore it by his own hand? Or that he could not reasonably promise the entire planet was about to be consumed in someone else’s rebellion? The words sank into the heavy walls. The silver-haired gentleman pushed his office chair back a few inches from the desk, from the dreaded tricorder; and signaled the nearest guard to hand back Kirk’s communicator. Strangely, the captain did not take it right away.

“And the woman?”

“Bring her immediately,” the man said quietly, though he seemed to have lost his last breath in the past minute or so: looking past the junior guards, who turned to go out through an old wooden door. 

Now Kirk took the communicator, and signaled Absalom to collect Spock’s scanner from the desk. It is indelicate in the extreme to gloat, but the balance of power had changed so completely, it seemed as though Kirk and his son stood guard over the 892’ers, for next long twenty minutes. Finally the sleeping woman was brought in, slumped in a wheelchair, a yellow blanket covering her from the neck down. They had taken the queen, from a very strange chessboard.

And that would have been the end of it, if they had the usual means to escape the system. Absalom had his mother, and could find a new life someplace where they had never heard of the Beagle. But this time, the starship couldn’t just leave all the long-term problems behind in the usual way. Drusilla was signed-in to sickbay, and Absalom stuck in a chair by her side. Both were asleep soon after that.

Back in the briefing room, Ms. Sulu and Mr. Scott floated dueling equations above the long table, to symbolize the invisible strains on the structure of space.

Kirk’s head was spinning by the time Hikaru Sulu’s daughter had gone through some of the basic equations, which hung in the air like alien ships before combat. Occasionally, one mathematical hologram would rotate, or capsize entirely, and go flipping upside-down, to illustrate a point she was trying to make, as she seemed to anticipate Mr. Scott’s contrary theories to be delivered next.

“Excuse me,” Kirk said, shaking his head, but still trying to look like he was keeping up with all this. He’d started out in engineering, but that was 35 years ago. “It seems like you transitioned from one thing to another just… there,” he said, half-standing and leaning toward a secondary, orange-colored equation, just beyond reach. 

“Here?” the younger Sulu asked. She waved her arm, like a scoop, and the holographic numbers and signs jiggled and slid across mid-air toward him, at the end of the table.

“Well, I thought it was the meaning of— of this implied sub-set of operations,” Kirk said, humbly, for he suspected everyone else in the room had a far better grasp of this than he. Even the security guard.

“Correct,” Ms. Sulu nodded, strangely satisfied that the captain had picked up on something almost invisible running through the latest problem. Either that, or she was humoring him, and backing up in the discussion for his benefit. It didn’t matter, they all just shared the same goal of getting back to a starbase again. 

After more debate over the virtues of the different model equations of their plight, Mr. Spock leaned forward, across from Kirk, to speak.

“We have, as sentient beings,” he began, apologetic at having to take the broadest imaginable view, “constantly been challenged in our understanding of ‘reality.’”

Farther down the table, Dr. McCoy looked longingly at the equations hovering brightly over the table, dreading the sudden onset of a metaphysical discussion.

“Whether it is the nature of light, refusing to be split or divided in experimentation, or entangled particles, dancing together across great distances. Or the ever-increasing rate of universal expansion. There are theories to explain all of these.” Now he straightened in his chair. “But here we are challenged by the underpinnings of reality itself.”

“Warping space to cross the galaxy was just such a ‘challenge,’ once upon a time,” Kirk nodded. “It became our new reality.”

“Indeed,” Spock said. “But when Zefram Cochran found a way to alter the balance of space and time, he could never imagine the interplay of hundreds or thousands of his warp engines, acting (inadvertently) in concert, to create their own faint ‘super-web’ of an artificial space-time continuum.”

“You’re saying we’ve imposed an entirely new creation, upon Creation itself?” McCoy scoffed.

“Indeed,” Spock nodded, mistakenly enthusiastic at the doctor’s description of their plight. “However, the manifestation of that ‘new creation’ remains largely hidden from view.”

“And you’re proposing,” McCoy jumped ahead, “that we bring it out in the open— for experimental purposes, to amuse the intellect. That we permanently change the map of the universe? By imposing another universe upon it?”

“That map is already emerging, though we cannot be sure if it will be a violent birth, as in the beginning. The subspace map is evidently changed every time we and the rest of the Federation employ warp drive. A trace of each journey leaves behind a spiderweb filament, that becomes part of a spun trap.” It was both fact and hypothesis. 

“And that’s why the engines balked,” Kirk said.

“None of our diagnostics have been able to clearly demonstrate a cause,” Spock leaned back. “But it is one of the theories on the table,” he added, though the table was already crowded enough with imaginary structures over the space between commanders.

The science officer began tapping rapidly on a wedge-pad before him, and the other equations shrank and slid off to the far end, momentarily forgotten. The map of Federation space, wrapping around various other self-contained empires, now sprawled across the flat table, with the usual space lanes running in all directions, like a chaos of longitudes and latitudes.

“This is a model of what we’re discussing,” Spock said and, with the touch of various spots on his tablet, showing this wedge of the galaxy. “And we of course are here,” he touched another button, and a tiny little Enterprise popped-up near the fringe of the highlighted area, at 892-IV. 

“And these are the local stress fractures,” he added, as a tangle of widespread red and yellow lines appeared— few in the immediate vicinity, but a glowing red vine, approaching Rigel and Earth, of course. “Tracing back, in time, we see the flaws became detectable approximately eighty solar years ago, as the Federation began its current ascent.”

The long red tangle diminished, as time “ran backwards” in the simulation: and the galaxy suddenly seemed peaceful again, looking back before the Romulan war. Then he brought the time-lapse forward, slowly, and it was almost blissful, the white lines turning golden, and then orange, like some chick growing in an egg. And then, in the last twenty years of time-lapse, the chick began to turn into a Denebian reptile, leaping through the air, across the briefing room heavens

“Does it have to be red like that,” McCoy asked glumly.

“It can be any color you like, Doctor,” Scotty said with false good cheer. Then his smile faded, and he leaned forward, as if to get up and walk out in defeat. “The point is that it’s no color at all, and it’s got us by the throat.”

The boatswain’s whistle sounded, and Kirk pressed the lighted button in front of him. Uhura’s voice came through from the bridge.

“Message from the planet, Captain.”

“I’m on my way,” Kirk said, getting up and nodding, as everyone else rose, perhaps eager to flee the dangerous vision.

“It appears you have removed two of our statused persons from the planet, Captain,” a bearded lady said, as Kirk nodded graciously, assuming the center seat. The woman wore black, and her beard was curly and upswept, like the dark hair that billowed above.

“My understanding, ma’am, is that they were very specifically ‘un-statused’ persons.”

“We would like their return at once, Captain,” the woman nodded, as if disagreement were impossible.

“I claim a… personal blood tie,” Kirk said, as if reading options from a rather disappointing restaurant menu.

“Our policy against off-world contamination is on record with your Federation,” she explained. 

“I would be happy to present myself as a hostage in this matter,” Kirk tilted his head, his tone gracious, though his words accused her of a criminal intent.

“We are not interested in further contamination, Captain,” sighed the woman, who’d been introduced earlier as First Servant Lopanak. It was odd, Kirk hadn’t noticed any other women with beards on his first two planet-falls here, and he was fairly observant. But such things were not unheard of.

“Surely you are confident of further talks on this matter,” Kirk gently implored.

“Present the mental patient and the riot leader at once. We have nothing to exchange in this matter, of a mutually beneficial nature.” The First Servant looked like she’d been knocking on a door for several minutes, grown weary and was about to walk away.

“We do not wish to question the legitimacy of the New Order,” Kirk said, as if the two were dancing at opposite ends of a wooden log in dark waters, each trying to spin the other one off. “But we are concerned about the claim of the one you call Absalom Merik. He presents himself as an heir to the late First Citizen.”

“We are aware of the mental illness that runs in this lineage,” Lopanak said, blinking wildly just once, outraged but bent on remaining calm. “However, there is another heir, as you say, with an adjudicated claim. He is Revolo Merik, whom you see here.”

At that, the view on the bridge main screen changed, to show a young man, vaguely similar to Absalom, standing near the First Servant. He seemed momentarily uneasy in his gray tunic, with a narrow red diagonal belt running from his left shoulder, down to his right hip, the color of Merik’s cape, twenty years ago. His hair was blond like Absalom’s but there seemed to be no layers to his psychology, just a kind of resignation in his eyes, as Lopanak gestured toward him. After a half second, Revolo threw out his chest slightly, as he had been taught.

Kirk nodded, for it was the prince and the pauper, or the two Dalai Lama’s, all over again. Absalom would be better off coming with the Enterprise, and Drusilla too. If they had any way of leaving.

For a guy who didn’t like girls, Kirk thought, Merik had somehow managed to have at least two living male heirs… 

Of course, Absalom wasn’t truly Merik’s son, and it was just as likely that Revolo wasn’t either. Why an entire race of people needed either one to represent them to an uncaring universe was anyone’s guess. And, most absurd of all, this was leading to some kind of war. It was always the same, the fear of chaos, that could only end in chaos. The people in charge wanted to stay in charge, and that was all that mattered. It was a chaos that somehow pooled within them.

Idly, in that momentary stare-down with the First Servant, Kirk imagined Amar and Connaught and all the Gideonite sons in this mad war, on behalf of a brother denied his rightful throne. Kirk had been in several horrible combat situations himself, and had no desire to be dragged into another. The bitter smell of smoke and of burning bones never changed. The odor had long ago made a permanent connection between his nose and brain.

But just as Lopanak stared back from the screen, to appraise him, he knew he would not give up the power of any of his own sons’ fates and destinies to some undeclared adversary. As sure as the First Servant meant to hold order on 892-IV, Kirk would find a way to give justice to Absalom. If only he could think how.

“Perhaps there is another path,” Lopanak said, tilting her head, as if hearing some new music. Or maybe the unintentional grimace on Kirk’s face showed too much of the bitter experience he had already had.


	12. Chapter 12

“Yes, I suppose it is a kind of… religion,” Servant Lopanak said, as she led an Enterprise landing party through a university quadrangle on a sunny day. 

She almost seemed to be remembering the echo of a joke, in the back of her mind. They were talking about the economic management of this isolated, Earth-like planet, untouched by the Federation for over 20 years. 

“But without a stable economy, all is lost,” Lopanak added blithely, as they walked across an open square in a tree-covered part of the capital. By all evidence, clean streets, beautiful old buildings, peace and quiet, it seemed stable enough. Meanwhile, Kirk was intrigued, and perhaps slightly annoyed, by her beard— dark and curly, short and not very thick, but somehow playfully accentuating her delicate facial structure.

They had left Absalom and Drusilla up on the ship. She was in no condition to travel, disoriented after years of drugs and isolation. When she did speak, she seemed to miss her nurses, and young cadets were assigned to sit with her in sickbay for a few days, as she regained her mental clarity. The anti-toxins Dr. McCoy was giving her did their work, biologically, right away. But her brain had become like an abandoned house, through years of neglect.

It didn’t matter if you called it a ‘religion,’ or just an economy, it was all the same to Jim Kirk: a worldwide structure for people who had control and meant to keep it. Churning it all up was usually a healthy side-effect of joining in the United Federation of Planets. But it occasionally posed challenges for the rulers.

“And so, to prevent a widespread revolt,” he said, reaching for an insight, “you just replaced the Old Order with the New.”

“Well,” Lopanak said, “we couldn’t go on, as a society, killing people on international hook-up, just to placate the weak, and chasten the strong. That sort of thing makes people numb. And you just end up with murder in the streets.”

“And what of the slaves’ religion?”

“Oh, people lose interest in that sort of thing,” she said, leading them up a stairway, into a very old office building, awash in the shadows of swaying trees. “Rules keep changing, education uplifts. The ignorant and the narrow become worldly and wise.”

“But to a casual observer,” Kirk said, as they walked down a long hall, “the fact of Revolo, seemingly existing just as a counter to Absalom, the ‘son from up in the sky,’ makes no sense.”

“Are we still talking of religion?” Lopanak smiled, ushering the landing party into a velvet draped dining room, with a long table and high-backed chairs. Servants busied themselves at the far end, with stacks of plates and trays, and polished flatware.

“I’m almost afraid to say,” Kirk sighed, for the revelation might tear the planet apart. It was such an odd idea, that the “son up in the sky” was not be some local, inevitable representation of Jesus, but rather something that sprang from his on loins. Odd, but easier to explain. 

“In the last days of the Old Order, the existence of the First Citizen’s family was revealed… unexpectedly.” Her voice went up, musically, as if searching for that last word. “Though some said it was just a vain attempt to keep the bloodline intact. To crown a successor to Merikus, and keep things going along down here, for those at the top,” Lopanak said, as wine was poured. “In any case, they were spared because of their status. We’d shed enough blood, on runaway slaves.”

“And by that time, the cat was out of the bag,” Kirk nodded, allowing himself an old Earth reference. The tonality of his voice suggested that something had inevitably gone wrong, in establishing the New Order from the start.

“On our planet we say ‘the mustard was browned,’” she nodded. She raised a glass of sparkling white wine, and Kirk did likewise.

“To golden mustard,” he said, chagrined, for neither of them were making any progress.

“And to cats who know their place,” she smiled. Kirk and Lopanak’s tall fluted glasses of bubbling wine ‘clinked’ together, in a sign of camaraderie that seemed utterly empty and maddeningly bizarre.

“Is there a story surrounding the loss of the Proconsul?” Kirk asked quietly, not daring to meet his hostess’ eye, as the remains of a cool fruit salad were cleared, and some sort of seafood omelet was put in its place, for each guest.

Lopanak sighed, as if wearily raising a flag at another sunrise, hoisting some official banner yet again up a tall hollow pole by means of a rattling rope against it, for the one millionth time. Some questions never went away, her exhalation seemed to say.

“All those people were dealt with, according to their crimes, by a series of public hearings.”

Kirk nodded, savoring the omelet, but looking around the room as if he wasn’t giving much credence to her version of events, scanning the furniture for a better explanation.

“And the violation of your Prime Directive?” Lopanak asked, somewhat predictably, he thought.

“The same, provisionally. It was decided the planet was healing itself.”

“And you’re here to check on that,” she said.

“Not exactly,” he smiled at his own foolishness, over wanting to see what had become of his offspring. But she didn’t get the joke.

He realized she was sitting stock-still, observing him, as if waiting for elaboration. Unlike men with beards, she hadn’t touched hers once yet, though its silky curls shone in the gentle light of the nearby leaded windows.

“It’s an old man’s folly,” Kirk said suddenly, with renewed good humor, of this grand tour of the galaxy. 

“With an entire starship, and hundreds of soldiers?”

“They are scientists,” Kirk smiled, at the sudden guardedness of the First Servant.

Her hands clenched pensively on the table, as if she were lifting the great weight of it merely by the suction of the palms of her hands, on either side of her plate. It wasn’t unusual for an informal negotiation to hit a snag, or a dinner to go wrong. But this seemed worse.

“Against such as you,” Lopanak said very quietly, “we have no defense. We have only our honor and our legacy, passing from our hands into the future.”

“Against such as we, no defense is needed,” Kirk blinked, as if he had created a misunderstanding. 

“And Revolo must represent that future,” she added, again quietly, but as if she were speaking the most unspeakable of truths.

“The Prime Directive says that’s entirely up to you.” It was odd how easily he said that.

She swallowed now, as if she couldn’t believe she had worried over nothing. Or couldn’t believe Kirk believed in the Prime Directive to begin with.

“We would still require Absalom for surety,” she said, looking away, but with an iron-hard sense of propriety.

“I’m afraid that’s impossible,” Kirk sighed, gently laying down his implements.

It was always like this. The conditions were optimized (here, with a fancy meal in a beautiful draped hall), to make it harder to just get up and leave. But any luncheon could turn to sand upon one’s tongue, once hard truths were revealed.

“He is a citizen of this world,” Lopanak half-whispered, looking at Kirk with an almost Gothic, dark urgency.

“And if he were down here,” Kirk mused,“he wouldn’t be the ‘son up in the sky’ any longer.”

At that, Lopanak’s fork came down with a bang! on her plate. 

We’re going to be arrested again, Kirk knew right away.

“Look,” he said, in the usual half-joking manner, “it’s not as though I’m going to smash the Prime Directive and interfere, propping him up as some sort of god on your planet.”

“We do not take this sort of thing humorously,” Lopanak snarled, standing as the guards advanced from the corners of the room. Kirk immediately assumed a non-threatening pose, his hands halfway up, on either side of his heart.

He had a sudden theory, that the “people of the Son” might somehow be strong enough in numbers to do some actual damage to Lopanak’s power, or even to the planet’s own economic security. Why else would she seem so grave about the most lighthearted remarks?

“You know,” he began again, with a self-effacing glance downward, “one of the good things about being on board with the Federation of Planets is, you’re not so completely vulnerable to the contamination… from within your own society.”

She looked at him as though he’d gone straight out of his mind.

“Your own people would see how many hundreds or thousands of other worlds have dealt with exactly the same problems, with the same primal fear of death, of the unknown, and gone on to survive— and to thrive, in a community of many great civilizations.”

There was no melting, no swooning, and no sound of french horns at his words.

“Please come with me, Captain, into the next room,” she said, glowering at the ornate rug beneath her shoes, and turning with a fierce dread on her face, as if the windows along one side were only bright mirrors in the middle of a carousel, spinning too fast to bear. The top of her head seemed red, like blushing.

It was a much smaller room, or pass-through, made even smaller by the huge gold trim everywhere, on dusty burgundy walls, like some tiny off-the-tour room in Earth’s Buckingham Palace. But they were alone, and she could speak privately, at last, with no guards, and no sleepy old ladies-in-waiting.

She turned to face him, once the door had closed with a quiet “whoomp.” 

“I don’t know what you’re trying to get away with here, Captain,” she began, seeming about to fly into a rage at the slightest provocation. “But I can’t have you talking about that nonsense in front of the guards and kitchen staff.”

“Please accept my sincere—“

“We don’t need your help here, but we must have Merik’s son back immediately, without any conditions attached. It is essential that this matter be brought to a close. And taking him off the planet as you did poses the gravest possible risk to our entire social order.”

“Again, I am deeply—“ He had already lost track of the microsecond where she had implicitly acknowledged the mixed-parentage of Absalom, as the son of a “barbarian.” Or as much worse, it now seemed, as some trickster from another realm: from the mad, fractured universe of the Prime Directive. The universe he once again tried to lay upon the Universe.

“Didn’t you do any research before coming back here like this?” She whispered desperately now, and her eyes seemed huge, though it was probably just the closeness of the room, which thrust them almost face to face, between the doors and walls. Maybe all their eyes bulged, as a threat display here. The pastoral paintings on the other side, on his left, seemed comical in the moment. He resumed his most diplomatic and calming demeanor.

“We were aware that your media had tried to channel the former slaves into a modified religion of the son, where people with money are thought to be closer to god,” he whispered back, though he was baffled by any philosophy that could accommodate such a notion.

“And the existence of Revolo erases the importance of Absalom,” she agreed, as if he were some kind of idiot. “Till you took Absalom off the planet. Suddenly he is elevated, literally, to a position in the sky. And Revolo’s importance is subtly destroyed.”

“If Absalom can claim religious persecution, he has the right to refuge,” Kirk said, changing the subject from mere intrigue.

“But when he magically becomes the ‘son up in the sky’ on your ship, a whole new problem rises up like the dawn,” she said, with a runaway look, as if they were already standing knee deep in blood, just waiting for the end to crush them too.

“You made that inevitable when you turned him into a dispossessed person, along with his mother,” Kirk insisted, more aware of the gravity of the moment, but not taking any of the blame for it. “You say you don’t believe in the ex-slave prophesy, but everything you do reinforces it!”

“Everything I do is to maintain order and reduce suffering and disease and starvation down to an absolute minimum. I have no other goal in mind,” she exclaimed quietly, her scalp taking on that rosy tone, under her hair. If he had broken her heart, he probably would have got the same physical reaction, for the top of her head very nearly showed her pulse, in shades of pink.

The hardest thing in the world, or in the galaxy, is to realize that someone else might perceive you as wrong, or even evil. And now the captain of the Enterprise was asking the First Servant to do just that; and vice-versa. Though both were people of learning and diplomacy and reason. And neither one could see it at all. 

“It’s very strange to me,” Kirk said at last, breaking the horrible silence of the moment, “that the most resistant worlds, to Federation membership, are always the most human.”

“I suppose that’s some kind of compliment,” Lopanak said through gritted teeth. There was a cold pause.

“No, it’s not.”

“Well then, I must get on with my business,” the First Servant shook her head, as if steam were rising off her face, like Sona choking on her own restraining mists; or like a Kentucky saddlebred after a morning run.

“Tell me what I can do to make this better, or at least safer, for your people,” he implored, to break a sense of dismay. There was grand opera behind her look of resignation.

“At this point,” she answered, “my people will be assuming some sort of glorious return from the sky, for Absalom. And I must do everything in my power to assure that never happens. Short of sending you on your way, with Merik’s son, and a promise never to return, we face a complete breakdown in our very sense of reality.”

“He’s not Merik’s son.”

Her eyes widened, and her skull went white. Then her whole expression narrowed with contempt. 

“You fool!” she snarled, the words barely rising above the volume of conversation, but twisted with acid. 

“The proconsul sent Drusilla to me, as a doomed man’s last romance. And then, with Merik’s help, my party escaped. And now I’m back, to determine if improved relations are even possible at all.”

“Then I suppose you think that we are the fools,” she nodded, as if one or the other must be. “Dragged down by some random intervention, some meaningless contact years ago, doomed to chaos and destruction, because of some old storybook, and the weaknesses of men!”

“Yes, but that doesn’t make you a fool,” Kirk said, as fairly as he could.

“I could kill you right now,” she hissed, though she hardly seemed like the type to hiss, in a serious business dress, with elaborate hair above the stately beard.

“Well, that would typically make things much worse,” Kirk mused, with gentle cautiousness. Of course in this exact moment, he did not imagine Starfleet was going to race across the galaxy with two or three ships all at once, to stop one world’s Armageddon. 

She turned half away, face to face with a painting of revelers, on one of the landscapes on the wall. It was the forlorn face of leadership, looking upon the gay idleness of her people. It was the real, and the ideal, and Kirk could imagine the hot white sparks flying off.

“Then we must avoid the typical,” she said, after a moment. You could practically hear her bending great iron beams in the back of her mind, twisting everything she’d assumed was solid and real, into something new.

“You didn’t tell me you were the messiah,” Kirk said wryly, to his 892-IV son. 

“It takes too long to explain,” Absalom replied, as the two sat on an observation deck, overlooking the very Earth-like planet below.

“No, you just say, ‘dad, I’m the messiah.’”

“Dance club messiah,” the young man sighed.

“Well, that seems harmless enough,” the weaver of stars allowed.

“And if I go back, with you, it’ll seem like some kind of prophesy fulfilled.”

“Then go back by yourself,” Kirk said.

“And they’ll kill me.”

“They didn’t kill you before.”

“They could see I was killing myself, with drink and drugs. And a wasted life.”

“On my planet we call that college.” He was trying to be funny, but it probably came out dismissively.

“You’re saying ‘be brave,’ and ‘go back,’ and ‘take what comes.’”

“I’d… say that no matter what.”

“But they need some kind of savior, and it’s just hopeless down there,” Absalom said, at last.

“From what?”

“Hopelessness,” the young man declared, repeating himself, and nauseated by it: his head swam at the dizzying range of denials held out by a stagnant, crooked world.

Kirk (as a provocation) looked at the boy as if he wasn’t making any sense. 

“Can’t you see?” Absalom declared, holding his hand out to the great blue sphere below. Slowly, he rose to his feet, presenting his case with passion. “Everything’s been monetized into a scheme for the old and the rich and the well-connected. Every moment of life, we’re like chickens in a cage, or calves in the stocks. We’re fed and bred as livestock for a superior breed, the breed of the well-established, to dine upon. And they act as if they have no idea that they’ve robbed us of our future, or if they do, it doesn’t matter. They just squeeze the young, and hold out impossible promises; and squeeze their parents, holding out bribes against the fear of aging, and stuff our heads with lies, and fear, and watch us as we’re ground down to nothing!”

This is my son, in whom I am well-pleased, Kirk thought, and a wave of love and warmth and compassion filled him, for the first time in a couple of years. He wasn’t perhaps as thoughtful as Sona, or as clever as Amar or Connaught. But there was something in Absalom to be feared, on an unjust world. He was more like David Marcus: banished to the streets, and raised as a rebel.

“I don’t want you dying for some cause that’s…” Kirk searched for the words that wouldn’t crush the boy’s spirit, “just going to be another empty promise, once you’re gone.”

A mad gleam flared in the boy’s eyes.

And so Kirk found himself in the odd position of working both sides of the street.

“That’s a terrible idea,” McCoy brooded, at his side, on the bridge.

“I don’t know, Bones, they both seem really into it,” the captain replied. 

“Neither wants a big uprising, and neither wants to keep the status quo,” McCoy said, trying to make sense of it. “The only thing they have in common is not giving an inch to each other.”

“No, Absalom wants a big uprising, and Lopanak wants to keep the status quo.”

“But neither wants to die.”

“Neither sees death as a card in the game.”

“And James T. Kirk’s son wants to turn the world upside down,” McCoy nodded.

“It’s an unjust, zero-sum, closed-system planet,” Kirk explained, defending Absalom’s idealism.

“But we believe in non-interference.”

“In a growing, viable system,” Kirk nodded. 

“So if they won’t become an open, growing, viable member of the Federation,” McCoy shook his head now, “the Federation will come in and meddle with them, so in effect, they are a member of the Federation, whether they like it or not.”

“So they can become a growing, viable system.” There was a brief, terrible silence between them.

At such times, freedom seemed a tyranny like any other.


	13. Chapter 13

He was getting used to screaming, over the pounding punk-disco music. 

“What?” This time, Kirk was wearing a less outrageous costume, black shirt and pants.

“Over there! In the stripey,” Absalom shouted into his ear, indicating a young woman who’d just appeared at the entrance of the dark flashing dance hall, amidst a throng being checked by a bouncer. Easing over that way, thirty feet or so, was like swimming through heavy sound, rhythm and beat, dappled by colored light. No wonder these kids felt hopeless and trapped, all their communication took place in a deafening roar.

“That guy’s an asshole,” the young woman shouted back in Kirk’s ear, after he attempted to explain who he was, in relation to Absalom, who watched from the bar. “Never calls back,” she said, pantomiming something like a seashell to her ear.

She had a great acoustical advantage, her voice could reach over the deep bass of the music, like the upper-frequency howl of creaking polar icecaps, atop a thundering ocean. Even Absalom seemed to understand what she was saying, and started toward her, looking abashed.

Soon the three were sitting at a nearby diner, late at night. It was much quieter. Her name was Taleel, and as he had already gleaned, she dated Absalom at least once.

“Six months,” Taleel corrected, though not very happily.

“Why did you break up,” Kirk asked.

“Because, when he shaved off his beard,” Taleel explained, a little more heightened in voice and manner, as if it made perfectly good sense to someone, somewhere, but with little Dickensian twirls of her fingers in the air to suggest absolute dementia, “when he shaved off his beard,” she repeated, for emphasis, “he looked just like me.”

“Oh,” Kirk nodded, at the awkwardness, and furtively glanced back and forth once, to verify the (now obvious) resemblance.

“So, congratulations, your boyfriend is not screwing you, he’s screwing himself,” she added, as if she were some colossal idiot who was suddenly having the obvious, huge fallacy of her entire life explained to her for the first time. The huge joke she thought was the love of her life. Come, laugh at me, aren’t I funny…

“Well, I suppose it’s natural for everyone to go through a phase li—“

“I am not a phase,” she said, very insistently. Months later, near the end, he re-imagined it all as screaming in a discotheque, the initial confrontation between the two young lovers, the first night Absalom appeared before Taleel, clean-shaven. In a way, Kirk wished he’d been there to see it.

“Well, do you think, on any deeper level of your mind or your heart,” Kirk said, after summoning up the courage to take a cup like steaming coffee from the table, and bring it to his lips. “Perhaps you also recognized the similarity, and maybe that helped you enjoy it too, or gave you a sense of… recognition? That it was meant to be?”

“I don’t care any more,” Taleel grumbled.

“But you do care,” Kirk said very simply and directly, “about getting some kind of social justice for this planet.”

She just looked quietly overwhelmed and exhausted at that, shaking her head, staring at the tabletop. Whether she could see Absalom reflected, across from her, at an angle, neither of the males could tell.

“And you’re the one person who can make a difference now, just by being who she truly is, herself,” Kirk said, having a pleasant sense he’d sealed the deal. 

It was not a perfect solution, because Absalom would never fully understand how she felt. He was tangled up in his own unresolved problems. But she could also see he had that horrible nobility clinging to his name, that had been trashed, in his childhood, by the New Order. It might gradually fall away, over time.

“Okay, yeah, whatever,” she sighed, just as the Native Americans must have said, welcoming the white invaders into North America, six hundred years earlier. Briefly, her eyes met Absalom’s. And in that instant they were like two old comrades in arms, remembering something better, from months ago.

The next morning, Kirk could watch her entering an office complex, and putting on a white lab coat: going through the underground tunnels, to a computer center. He was tracking her with primitive surveillance cameras in every hall and vestibule and clean-room down on the planet, from up on board the Enterprise, with Absalom hunched over his shoulder, in the captain’s cabin. Neither man dared to breathe, as the starship’s sensors tracked her from one office to the next.

The silence between them, watching the video feed on Kirk’s screen, was suffocating. Finally Absalom spoke up, as they watched her make her way to the central computers.

“So, should I grow my beard back again?” He felt, after this, he would owe Taleel something or other, and this might somehow return them to "square one."

Kirk made a face to show his own not-knowing.

Then, as if they had missed it, they could see Taleel wheeling a cart down another row, between computer processor stacks. The cart held two cake-keeper domes on top, with what appeared to be large, old-style magnetic discs under each hazy lid. She was literally stealing the memory and codes of 892-IV, or at least the part they’d computerized so far. Rows and rows of metal bookcases filled with old paper records were being transferred onto computer, by people at nearby desks, who seemed bemused or methodical or talking to a neighbor, and barely looking up from their paperwork and keyboards. In that steady process, government files were transferred to the planet’s first memory banks: old identities, on paper, from the previous regime, into the earliest cyber-records.

Then she went around two more corners, and for a long minute the screen couldn’t find her. Whether she was totally off the video feed, or if the Enterprise’s own computer had lost track of her, was unclear. She popped back up on the screen, in a different part of the clean-room, and Kirk had the vague impression the cake-keepers had been switched somehow. On the black-and-white feed, it was very difficult to tell: the whites were too white, blurring and bleaching a trail on the screen as she went briskly around the room, in the false video glow of her own lab coat.

“If they catch her…” Absalom warned, very quietly.

Kirk nodded.

And just then someone stopped her. They watched a long moment’s face-to-face, a soundless interchange with another over-exposed image, like one incomprehensible ghost confronting another in some bleached-out hyperspace. Then, as Kirk and his son were looking down from a security camera’s vantage point overhead, she moved on again.

Whatever happened next, she could never come back. 

Unaccountably, she was running down a long hallway without the domes. Absalom thought they could see one of the magnetic discs under her arm, but it was impossible to tell. 

A little “please wait” icon, an empty circle of Federation laurel leaves, blinked politely up in the corner of the cabin screen. And when it came back, the images had changed from corridor to mezzanine to lobby to street, as the ship’s computer tried to find her again. But she had vanished, as surely as Drusilla, twenty years ago. 

James T. Kirk began to imagine the two discs were the Romulus and Remus of 892-IV’s new computer empire, the founders of a real new order, and the carefully measured identity of its fate. Of course, in that new legend, Taleel had become the wolf mother, holding their futures in her own two hands.

“Scotty, have you got her,” Kirk said, his finger on the intercom button on his little office table.

“Well, I think so,” Scott’s voice came, from down in the transporter room. Kirk and Absalom hurried out of the cabin and around the long, sweeping corridor of deck five.

“That’s not even a woman,” Kirk protested, at his chief engineer, as an 892’er was materializing in the beaming chamber. The captain stood halfway between the control panel and the lenses, his shoulders slumped in disappointment while the glowing figure took shape, in the usual crouch of surprise. The hazy outline of a person stood alone among the six pads, as the stabilizers glowed like flames behind protective quartz shields. It was a man, almost certainly, holding two metallic discs. He was still a column of blue ripples, forming into a humanoid.

Kirk rushed up and grabbed the discs from his hands. And, sliding the three touch-panels back in the opposite direction, Scotty sent him back where he belonged, all in less than five seconds. Glow in, glow out. Both Starfleet officers exhaled, as if they’d made the startling decision to end their own careers by robbing a bank.

“Can you find the girl,” Kirk said, a little more clearly, as Scotty looked back and forth between the big scanner in the middle of the panel, and the slow-blinking lights to his left. And then back again.

“Ye never gae me a tricorder scan,” the engineer glowered, peering into the center screen. Resigned, he threw open the beaming field and thrust the sliders up again. All six pads came to life, with a humanoid beginning to form in each pillar of energy, two standing like guards at one end of the hexagonal pattern, two sitting opposite, and two in between, seeming to face away from the circle.

Kirk felt he could already discern which would end up being Taleel, and he walked to the other side of the front of the chamber, and waited. She was falling to the pad, when she formed, and a man in a white coat had likewise tumbled down on his own posterior. The gentleman they’d brought up a moment ago was standing in front, looking mystified all over again, while Kirk leaned over the wide step and grabbed the girl. The comedy repeated itself, and the other five went back where they came from, all in a buzzing glow.

“That was graceful,” Kirk said, under his breath, of the entire operation. He caught Taleel a second time, as she stumbled, twisting in astonishment. They all did that, if you weren’t ready to catch them by the arm. Then everything was quiet, before the red alert sounded.

“Missiles from low orbit,” Spock’s voice came, from the bridge, as Kirk held on to the transporter console himself. That could be very bad indeed, if this really was like 20 years after their first visit to a 1960’s Earth-style planet. He prayed the analogy was wrong.

Mr. Scott, for all his many sterling qualities, had to get the last word in, as Kirk and Taleel disappeared through the doors, quietly declaring,

“Any time that half of them don’t land on their asses, is a good landing.”

Kirk and Taleel hurried out of the lift onto the bridge a few moments later, and Spock surrendered the center seat without hesitation. 

“Status, Mr. Chekov,” Kirk said, for about the one thousandth time in his life.

“Phasers locked on, three missiles approaching at subsonic speed, increasing to two thousand” (kilometers per hour) “closing at (a distance of) one hundred and fifty.”

“Fire when ready,” Kirk nodded. A moment later, red bolts of fire lashed out, and all four warheads above the rim of the planet burst into small suns, before vanishing.

“And why do you think that happened,” Admiral Stopak said, with a slight tilt of her Vulcan head. It was still considered a coup to have a Vulcan in Starfleet, though she had risen through diplomatic feats, after serving on the USS Interceptor for two tours.

“I’m not sure,” Kirk sighed, “they aren’t fully computerized, it’s not like they don’t have all the same information from the old order, on paper.” He felt superficial, but the Admiral’s subspace communication was scheduled one way or another, just ninety minutes after the 892-IV barrage.

“But they insist on the return of the one you call Absalom,” Stopak prodded, staring at him through a briefing room tri-screen. Mr. Spock sat facing another side of the transmission. It was quiet, the thrumming of the ship’s great engines having been silenced.

“Yes ma’am,” Kirk nodded. 

“And you refused.”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Based on individual rights and sovereignties.” She nodded, at the concept of a micro-federation of selves, interacting in the normal, every day manner, jostling back and forth. For it was the goal of such galactic order: that all people could have their own patch of disorder. Until the torsion ripped everything apart.

“Yes ma’am.” At least she acknowledged his rationale. Getting into a shooting match over it was something else, though. He and Stopak stared at each other, across a gulf of hundreds of light years, seeming to absorb additional information from each other, in the silence itself. They were probing for doubts, as allies do from time to time.

“The simplest solution,” Stopak inhaled quietly, “is for you to undo the damage by withdrawing with your offspring, and letting the planet heal itself.”

“We can never know,” he began, looking down in honest humility, “how much contamination came from Captain Merik, and the Beagle. And how much came from me, and the Enterprise. And how much more is coming from my son, and the temporary hindrance of their computer record-keeping,” he added, as if it were not a question of crippling the New Order. 

“You’re saying it’s an alliance of mishap and mismanagement,” Stopak blinked. And that was a hell of a reply, because she seemed to be referring to the long human history of conflict, rising from selfish motives, and deeper neglect of cooperation. It seemed a veiled indictment of his species. But, if nothing else, Vulcans were coming right out with it these days. It was another example of everything falling apart.

“If a society has a long history of rebellion, and refuses to address the rebels’ demands,” Kirk laughed, very briefly, “and some 'wild card’ is introduced that heightens the importance of the rebels, after many years of cruelty and abuse,” he added, his tone and posture becoming more upright and dynamic, and even daring, “then who’s to say where the mishap and mismanagement really lies? The unspoken human rule, is that the two can never be separated: that mishap and mismanagement are part of the fabric order and logic, not the exception.”

“Logic can be great or small,” Stopak nodded, maintaining a directness of gaze. And though both the admiral and the former admiral were speaking in courteous tones, the whole matter took on an ugly cast. To Kirk, all the Vulcan words for “logic” merely added up, like the hundreds of Inuit words and phrases for “snow,” into the same not-knowing.

They bade each other farewell, and the little briefing room screens flipped to the Federation insignia, clusters of constellations, held together by imaginary, galaxy-sized laurel leaves. Somehow the only thing that united them had transformed into a subspace fracture, that made the whole thing seem unworkable.

“Obviously,” Kirk sighed, “we have to go back.”

“To starbase, or the planet?” Spock enquired, caught in the middle, and a faint scowl on his own lips. Nothing had been solved, which was of course the usual solution.

“Well,” the captain said, slowly pushing back from the long table and standing, his first officer doing likewise, “the planet, till they figure out a way to yank us back home.”

“Then I shall require another hat.”

By the time Kirk had assembled the landing party, the science branch had duplicated both magnetic discs, and everyone had changed into something very local, the women in benign pantsuits, the men in jackets and slacks: instantly forgettable, like spies. The only remarkable accoutrements were bright little nylon-like vests and arm bands with numbers and letters on them, put on as a final touch. The ship’s replicator also spat out a padded set of sound-speakers which Mr. Spock could wear on his head, to cover his ears. Ms. Sulu and Mr. Chekov were trying to teach him to “bounce,” as if he were street-dancing to some very rhythmic, imaginary music.

“No, to the beat,” Hikaru Sulu’s daughter insisted, though of course there was no music at all, they were really just trying to teach him a shifting, dancing kind of walk that he would never be able to duplicate, no matter how well he could count.

“Imagine,” Mr. Chekov sighed hopelessly, “your shoulders vere… marching in von direction, and your heeps…” he trailed off, for he had never considered the problem of seemingly-nonexistent Vulcan hips.

“Just… do this,” Lt. Haines interrupted, jutting her head forward rhythmically, and closing her eyes with an air of ecstatic dissipation.

“Mightn’t I simply be listening to a spirited discussion of politics or the arts?” the senior officer asked.

“No, you mightn’t not. Not with those ears,” Haines shook her head reprovingly. “Those cans have gotta cover a lot of territory up there, Mr. Spock,” she added, looking up at him. “And they look like they’re producing a lot of sound, you know what I’m saying? You gotta make it look like you’re carrying the Vulcan Tabernacle Choir in your head, okay? To be convincing! You gotta move a little, is all I’m saying.” She attempted another demonstration of delicious upper-body and elbow dancing, her lips making slight “tss-uh-uh-tss-uh-uh” snare drum noises.

And so, reluctantly, his hips marched in one direction toward the beaming chamber, and his shoulders on a sort of non-parallel track, in opposition to all that was happening below. And all five of them seemed resigned to spending another night in jail, on 892-IV, as they disappeared in furies of light. By a prior arrangement, the sixth pad appeared to be empty.

Mr. Scott and Mr. Kyle reassembled them in a wide circle, all around the trading floor of the planet’s largest stock and commodities exchange, still in hexagonal formation, but spread much farther apart— In a hallway, in a side room, in an unused office, in a stairwell, on a balcony, and a corridor running behind the bidding arena. 

As expected, Revolo soon appeared on the main overlook, above the trading floor, in a suit with a dark shirt underneath. Across his chest he wore a large ceremonial necklace over his jacket, and over the backwards sash, which was visible between his lapels. He was part of a group of men, mostly older, and a few women, gathering around a large ceremonial bell, set between two large wheels, about to go clanging back and forth.

As brothers go, he didn’t really look much like Absalom, in person— the hair was approximately the same color, and the shape of his face was roughly similar, but the pieces added up to something different— more Merik than Kirk, which made sense, if lineage were law. Kirk was probably just imagining it, but Revolo seemed to have the air of someone who expected you to strike at him, even in the friendliest moment. There was a wariness, a distrust, that somehow made him distrustful as well. Apart from that, he was probably just some young actor who had landed a much bigger part than he’d auditioned for.

But he was surrounded by supremely confident older men, who constantly seemed to be suppressing a belch. The women on the balcony appeared gracious but eager to stay out of the way of the waving hands of a few very in-the-know-looking, great walrus men; and others whose main occupation seemed merely to smile and tell jokes to one another, up on the platform. The men took turns holding their arms up, and going back and forth with them, as if signaling ships at sea.

The crowd of shouting traders below barely took any notice. In fact, if Kirk and the rest had beamed down directly among them, instead of by stealthier means, it might not have made a bit of difference. The shouting, and the waving of little pieces of paper, and the constant patting the large arm-bands on their coats in coded finger taps, aimed at people across the room, was urgent and consuming. Boxy color TV’s on a set of pillars in the center of the trading floor showed inexplicable bars and graphs and (apparently) famous people looking very pleased with themselves and chattering away, as more numbers and graphics flashed behind them on their own screens. Just a normal day in the life.

Jim Kirk circled around, trying to get closer to the dais up above. Guards looked bored, or as though they needed another hour of sleep, at the exits; and big clumsy cameras were arranged in the corners, pointing toward the center of the floor. He could see Haines right away, and Spock after that, but Chekov and Ms. Sulu were neither very tall nor dark, and harder to pick out.

Sona would be somewhere among the traders, who must have seemed like trees around her: in absolute silence, frozen amidst a thousand colored bits of bidding paper hanging in the air. She may have gotten up to the platform an hour ago, by her own reckoning. Of course, if anyone asked, Kirk had no knowledge of her tagging along at all.

At normal speed, it was chaos: a very masculine, steady sort of chaos, as if one were striding naked through a car wash, without the protection of an actual car around them. Guys trying to capture the attention of other guys five or ten meters away: a million years’ removed from apes in the jungle, or not. Here the men wore wide re-imaginings of suspenders, and bow ties that seemed almost like silk flower arrangements coming up from the collars, and even taller moussed, blow-dried hair. It reminded him again, there were no exact parallels to Earth.

And then the big bell began clanging back and forth, and all the TV screens changed to show Revolo and the older men laughing and smiling, reenacting an ancient ceremony, with several of them resting a hand on the full-circle wheels of the bell, looking silly, like children at a petting zoo, awkwardly touching a horse for the first time. An air of impatience filled the pit, as the shouting died down. It was like Kirk and Spock's first landing, at the dance hall, when the music stopped a few nights ago. But the occasional whispering among the traders in their vests and coats lent an air of palace intrigue. This was their seat of power, after all, and their palace.

As quickly as that, Spock and Haines had disappeared again, and he stopped glancing around for Sulu’s daughter and Mr. Chekov, as he went circling to get to the dais up above. They’d studied the schematics of the room earlier and, adopting the common look of boredom and consternation, which began to seem like prisoners in the yard, he slouched from one vantage point to the next, till he was more or less behind a guard in a stairwell.

Up above, barely visible, one of the older walrus men was talking loudly about the promise of computerization, and the higher “efficiencies” of automated decision-making, though perhaps it seemed too soon for this vacuum-tube culture to be speaking so commonly of algorithms and artificial intelligence, even by Earth’s own 1987-ish standards. And yet he knew, from his own history, on a world where power and greed had been the real gods, that more and more people would find themselves in the hell of poverty and desperation, as only a few would remain at the top, to pull the strings through a computerized business model. The people, far from being fulfilled by social advances, would simply become more and more like interchangeable parts in a machine, as an entirely different “new order” emerged, on top of the old: where you were competing, not just with your neighbor, or a neighboring country, but with the entire world, to survive. Once again, he had to wonder how Earth ever made it through.

The captain slipped away from the main trading floor and climbed a few steps behind the balcony. But he was suddenly thrust back— or so it seemed: pushed by an invisible hand, not even halfway up the stairs. He took it as a warning, and went back to the previous spot, behind the guard by a balcony pillar.

Without warning, as the rich men up above tried to rally buyers to their stock, the scene on the floor went from a still, mumbling bitterness, to something Biblical: with dozens of homeless men and women popping up all over inside the chamber, and punked-out kids in their teens and 20’s thrown in as well, or so they seemed to Kirk. A kind of dull tyranny turned to an all-out insane asylum, just like that: loud wondering, and the ranting of the mentally deranged, and the well-heeled deranged, and everything in between, drowning out the last faltering sentence or two from the corporate executives up above. The guards began picking up the street people, gently or roughly, and herding away the young ones with their outstretched arms and thrust-out chests. 

As traders shrunk in around the central pillar, crowded with TV screens, the TVs themselves began crashing down to the floor, in a hail of sparks and smoke. Almost comically, the men directly beneath were pushed aside at the last moment, before they could be killed by the screens’ mere images of the falling balcony, falling on top of them in turn. The image of thing they’d watched on the screens, from a safe distance, was very nearly the thing to do them in from overhead. For in the world of investing, the appearance of a thing was as real as the thing itself. 

And that was the other magical thing about it, from a Prime Directive point of view: that Jim Kirk seemed to have had nothing to do with it whatsoever.

That was when he noticed the balcony actually was crashing down, not just on the TV screens, as its royal coterie went spilling over the balustrade, and others clambered back into the hidden area behind it for safety. It was the fall of the walls of Jericho, and the turning of the money-lenders tables in the temple, both rolled into one. Startled men in suits fled into back rooms, which were exposed as collections of old framed photographs of rich old men, and arched little doors to the back stairs, and one poor secretary looking shocked in a corner: rising from her chair, as these newer old men shoved each other aside to escape. Down below in the rubble, Kirk thought he saw long metal jacks, cranked sideways to spread the brick and mortar supports, that had fallen amidst the wreckage, after cracking the pillars apart.

He looked around to see if they’d accomplished their goal, as the other members of the landing party assembled behind him— the backup they hadn’t actually needed. A few homeless people, or stunned, pinstriped traders in the midst of the beaming formation were blinked out of existence, to reappear a few feet away, as James T. Kirk whipped out his communicator. He gave the order, after he’d seen their quarry behind him: blurring a bit, but occasionally recognizable: as Sona held him in place.

They had captured Revolo.


	14. Chapter 14

Predictably, the red alert began sounding immediately after they materialized again in the transporter room. He supposed more nuclear warheads were on the way, and left it to Lt. Haines to see to their captive. Sona had never “zapped” out of hyper-speed, but you could hardly have caught him without her. Mr. Spock removed the headphones, and found his way to the turbolift behind Kirk. They waited an extra few seconds for the helmsman and navigator to come rushing in after, before riding up to the bridge.

Mr. Spock was reading from his tricorder, and looking far from whimsical.

“Computer projections show that while their weaponry is primitive, consisting of nuclear warheads launched mainly from orbit, the sheer number of them, approximately 13,473, means there is roughly a 1.9 percent chance of severe damage.”

As they stepped out onto the bridge, the view ahead showed the blue and gold planet, and a constant series of white hot explosions in cold orbit, fading to yellow and orange, after quick stabs of phaser fire. A minute later the red alert klaxon fell silent, but the warning lights flashed around the bridge.

“Take us out to a thousand,” Kirk nodded.

“Shifting out to one thousand kilometers’ orbit,” Mr. Chekov nodded, taking the con. There was a little spray of cement dust on his hair and one shoulderttt, from the shattered pillars.

“Contact from the surface,” Uhura said as the planet fell away on the screen.

“On screen.”

The first servant’s eyes seemed to have become permanently bugged-out, under a dark brow. 

“You have interfered with our economy, captain,” Lopanak said, very flatly. 

Kirk could go on taunting her all day, or at least till 892-IV ran out of bombs. But what was the point of that? Other than to run them out of bombs. But roughly two percent of 13,000 warheads amounted to about 250 explosions that could actually hit the Enterprise…

“There’s nothing wrong with protecting your economy,” Kirk said, sympathetically. “There’s nothing wrong with money. We used to call it ‘symbolic labor.’ But it always seemed to end up… going to people who weren’t doing the labor.”

“We spend a lot of time planning things, Captain, to keep everything running as smoothly as possible,” she simmered. “To keep the largest number of people peacefully employed and feeding their families, to keep nations working together as one, and to advance the ideals of those who sacrificed before us.”

“May I ask,” Kirk said, rearranging himself in the captain’s chair, his head bowing very slightly for an instant, in a marginal show of respect, “do you intend to keep blasting away at us until you are completely denuclearized?”

“You have now stolen away both of the two brothers,” Lopanak explained, sounding as though it were perfectly logical to sustain an old legend, on a planet devoted to hard-nosed economics.

“And their mother,” Kirk added, though he hadn’t spoken with Drusilla since they'd checked her into sickbay.

“Captain,” Lopanak demurred, sounding as reasonable as possible, “these are deeply troubled people, who filled an impossible role in the difficult instant between two great epochs. Absalom and his mother were thrust forward in a time of panic, and have gone back to obscurity, as our world regained its proper shape.”

Needless to say, Kirk did not care for the idea of destroying people, as though they were bit players, in the comings and goings of great empires. Catharsis in this case seemed… convenient.

“If our ship is damaged by your passionate attacks,” he said, becoming serious, “we will have no choice but to deactivate your ability to protect yourselves.”

“You’re already doing that!” 

“How?”

“You have seized our symbols of solidarity and stability,” she said, becoming louder, and rising up from her desk in an ornate office. The camera across the desk from her jerked slightly to keep her “in frame.”

“But you can’t just grind people up, their identities, and throw them into an asylum, to make yourselves look sane and successful by comparison, as the new rulers,” Kirk insisted. 

She didn’t give a flat-out “oh, yes we can!” But her jaw slid forward, as if she were about to devour him in one gulp, for his lack of sophistication. 

“What guarantees can you give, for the safety of these un-statused people?” He was trying to remember: it seemed Taleel was on board now, but he’d lost track. That would make it four, total, not three. Though she hadn’t been fired yet, as far as he knew, and Revolo was still Revolo.

In the next uncomfortable pause, there was a loud boom! against the hull of the Enterprise, that clanged like thunder through the vessel. You could see even Mme. Lopanak look startled— her missiles had somehow found a soft spot in the starship’s defenses. She leaned away, and an aide leaned toward her on the screen’s left, to discuss the breakthrough.

A graphic square appeared on the head of the aide, on the bridge viewscreen, and a list of identifying information appeared in a new column on the right. It showed the aide’s name and rank and title, and went on to give other information they’d copied from the magnetic discs.

It then became an information race, even as Mme. Lopanak and Mr. Llardella (for this was the name of the aide) were simultaneously tracking down the weak spot in the deflector screens of the Enterprise.

In similar fashion, Mr. Spock came down to the center seat, armed with a computer screen in his hands, not visible to the 892-IV’ers, and began explaining, very quietly, what had happened in the explosion. He pointed to this circle and that flashing dot, where the port engine strut met the engineering decks. 

The rain of warheads, and the phasers blasted away for some minutes. And if Lopanak and Llardella had come up with some kind of a plan to bring down the Enterprise, it hadn’t materialized yet. Mr. Chekov looked bored and dismayed at the helm, as the ship’s computer was doing most of his work: a hail of incoming nuclear weapons would be shown above the planet, hundreds of miles away: slowly approaching. And a grid would appear on the screen, and a little automated countdown would click away in the corner, and then another computer-programmed burst of phaser fire would create twenty or forty or more little bursts of starlight, across the rim of this world.

Finally, he could stand it no longer, and Mr. Chekov began brooding, till a mad gleam burst forth in his own eyes. He switched to manual firing, and borrowed some schematics from the ship’s memory banks. When a sufficient number of weapons were approaching, the helmsman fired the phasers in just such a pattern as to create a glowing image of the Starship Enterprise, blazing up in orbit, for all the hundreds of millions who might be watching from the night-side of 892-IV below. It was a flag-waving moment, and a sign of human resilience, at least as far as the helmsman was concerned.

Now he smiled. Ms. Sulu, not even half his years’ junior, gave him a matronly, sideways glance, which did not deter him in the least. He set about designing another nuclear fireworks display, for the sad little people trapped down on the planet, whose leaders disdained the Federation. If the phasers struck these warheads first, and then those, in a particular sequence, and much later the unneeded remainder, a good distance away, any sort of sky-writing became possible.

But then he went too far. Using a picture from the ship’s records, and pointilizing a map of three new waves of incoming fire, he planned out a dotted pattern on a helm screen, from a likeness of Captain James T. Kirk himself. He laid-in the firing pattern: three or four brushstrokes of phaser bursts would be needed to paint a very elaborate glowing visage, of sheer megatonnage, one burst fading first, to become the shading; a second phaser burst to become the half-tones; and a third set of explosions to be the photo-image highlights, smiling down from the night sky above. It would be magnificent. And even friendly, Chekov insisted to himself.

Except for the people looking up, especially in the most northern and southern regions, where the image was distorted by the planet’s curve. For them the face of Captain James T. Kirk, in lights in the sky, was all reversed. And the glittering display that hung in the blackness bore an unexpected resemblance to the reckless, dissolute young Absalom Merikus.

After the initial shock wore off, those who were old enough to harbor a nostalgic fondness for the Old Order came out in robes and nightgowns. They flooded the streets, triggering all-night demonstrations. In the hours to come, in Absalom’s honor, the boulevards and even the suburban cul-de-sacs became a vast and sinewy dance hall, lit by strange pulsing beams and blasts far overhead. No longer hardened by regular drinking, but imbibing happily now, many of the millions of these people would have to call in sick the next day: further slowing economic activity. The next morning, all the night-time fireworks, and celebrations, played out again on the planet’s new services.

But in the first moments, it seemed utterly inconsequential: the vast and smiling face in the sky was beginning to fade, and being replaced by more random nuclear bursts, to clean up the unused points of light. But soon a new assault went firing up from the surface, becoming more incessant. Angry rockets burst from their silos, in clutches and dozens, as a reflection of Lopanak’s outrage, since she’d learned about Kirk and Drusilla. 

Meanwhile, a graphic on the ship’s screen showed the phaser batteries dwindling, and no warp power to build them up again. Things were suddenly looking very 'not good' for the Federation.

“Take us out to a hundred thousand,” Kirk sighed. Of course he was struck with sentimentality that Chekov would have had such an inspiration in the first place. But it now seemed to have had the opposite effect on their adversary.

“Plotting new orbit, one hundred thousand kilometers,” Chekov said, seeming more relaxed, not yet knowing of the consequences of his inspirations.

“Orbit laid in,” Ms. Sulu nodded, with a few taps of the navigation console. 

“Captain,” Mr. Spock said, from the upper control ring. “We shall have to leave the planet’s orbit entirely, or lose all phaser function.”

“How long can our shields hold out against them, Spock?”

“They may continue firing, at this rate, increasingly dependent upon land-based missiles, for up to forty-five more minutes.”

“Well, that’s one way to denuclearize a planet,” Kirk sighed.

“But our shields will begin to collapse, without phaser cover, in eight to ten minutes.”

“Plot a course beyond the eight planet,” Kirk nodded, perking up visibly as he did the math.

Just as soon as that, there was a message from phaser control below-decks.

“Captain, we’d like permission to take phasers off-line for a five-day refit,” Lt. Gavin’s voice said, through the overhead speakers.

“That’s fine,” Kirk said, though he sounded a bit uncertain, to his own ears.

“That way we can be ready if something really serious comes up,” Gavin added.

“Let me know how it’s going,” Kirk nodded, and clicked-off the comm-link. Something “really serious.” He counted down the possibilities: some sort of cataclysmic rip in the fabric of the universe, caused by the local warp fractures, to swallow them all up; or the universe itself snapping back down into a singularity, which frankly was not that scary, if it all happened all at once. Or some combination of those things. Or an alien attack. Or more damn kids. 

When he found Absalom, the 21 year-old was in the observation deck above the impulse engines, watching 892-IV recede to a fine blue point in the blackness. The son of Merikus was cozied up to Taleel on a padded banquette, with little trees and plants growing all them. The young lovers’ heads glowed like orbs of candlelight in the shadows.

Revolo sat in the brig, meanwhile, still weighted down by a ceremonial necklace, when Captain Kirk came down for a talk. The red sash of privilege peaked through the young man’s suit coat like an incision in his chest, and he barely stirred from the hard cot that jutted out from the cell wall, when Kirk came and sat on a twin bench.

“Is there any thing I can get for you, to make your brief stay here more comfortable?” Kirk inquired.

“No, thank you,” Revolo said, past him up at the wall. His absolute stillness made him look like an image of himself, stamped on a coin. For all Kirk knew, it already was. 

“We have a little problem here,” the captain said, warming to the idea of a father-and-son talk, as long as he could feel he had no long-term responsibility for this particular young man, or vice-versa, or any relationship at all. It was almost as though, after meeting dozens of his actual sons, he was finally getting past the dry-run stage, and ready for the forced intimacy of family. And it wasn't even his family, this time.

The real problem was that James T. Kirk simply did not believe in “the patriarchy.” And that made him ill-suited to the role of a patriarch. He never felt that older men, or men in general, were due some exceptional amount of reverence or respect. And now he was that older man, only to discover some people actually needed to look up to him. But, he remained convinced the center could not hold, at least not in his case. 

“What is our little problem, then,” Revolo prodded, breaking the silence, as two guards likewise posed for coins outside the cell door. “The little broken toy we share, that binds us both… together?”

“You can’t both be the prince.” There was an awkward silence.

“Then one of us must die,” Revolo sighed, and lay himself down on the cot. Now he was Richard II, telling the stories of the deaths of kings, in his last little dungeon, after foolishly granting mercy to his foe, back in act one, scene two. The great necklace, of dark silver and lustrous gems, swung around his neck, and partway down his side, as if an entire royal court were sliding away from him.

Then he understood. Some part of James Tiberius Kirk simply could not admit that he was old, and that same sliver of vanity also held with great conviction that anyone younger could not possibly be taken seriously as any kind of leader or ruler, while he still imagined himself to be young. To elevate a twenty year-old to a post of leadership gave him the worst feeling of patriarchy imaginable. No matter which twenty year-old it happened to be.

And that’s how he knew there was something else behind the throne on 892-IV that he hadn’t figured out yet. Because if he were feeling this, inevitably, it meant that someone down there was feeling exactly the same thing. An impossible dialectic, between princes, was (by its very definition) impossible.

“Because without just one of you, it all falls apart,” Kirk said.

Revolo laughed an unhappy little laugh, at his own pending mortality.

“Or does it?” the former admiral asked, flatly, and perhaps a bit too impetuously. 

And after he raised that odd little question, Revolo’s manner changed in an instant. If he were a confident, proud sea slug, covered in grand ruffles and tendrils and long-stalked eyeballs, as it munched on seaweed, all of that glory was hastily pulled-in: leaving Revolo as an enigmatic figure, utterly camouflaged. In a twinkling, he was just some itinerant young actor, who happened to bear a resemblance to Merikus: resting between scenes, sitting in a studio commissary somewhere, thinking of character.

“You know,” Kirk began again, “power can be many things. A grand necklace, a family name, a great army. Or just a whisper on a trading floor, that causes a panic; a shift in confidence that triggers a plunge in fortunes, or imagined fortunes, all at once.”

“In fact, the surest way to keep… power,” Kirk added, trying not to frighten the younger man, but racing toward a conclusion, “is to be the whisperer, and to give the necklace, or the family name, or the great army… to someone else. For safe keeping.”

Revolo’s scalp turned a horrible shade of bruised blue, under his dyed blond hair, as if he had been pierced through the heart. 

There were too many shadows dancing in Kirk’s head. He could not help himself, and stood up, walking one step to the end of the little room, away from the prisoner, and then two steps back to the other end. It only seemed to prompt Revolo to look the other way, in further withdrawal.

And then there was the matter of Mr. Chekov’s self-indulgence, during the inconclusive battle over the planet. The normally plucky helmsman looked worried, in the briefing room on deck three, as the other senior officers sat down around him. Finally, James T. Kirk walked in, and the hearing began. A yeoman sat at an automatic stenography machine, while Mr. Spock had his usual “waiting for a bus” face on, at the larger computer by the captain.

The tri-screen replayed the scene in the bridge, a minute or so before Chekov rearranged the phaser fire, to create the glowing pictures in the sky above 892-IV. On the screens, the Russian seemed annoyed, or bored out of his mind, as the computers launched perfectly efficient salvos of fire toward the slowly approaching missiles and warheads, hundreds of miles off in the distance, most of them too small to be observed by the naked eye.

Then, as if he’d picked up a knife and gone after some unsuspecting victim, the screens all zoomed in on his face, at the exact moment (the video seemed to suggest) that Chekov had “cracked,” and taken matters into his own hands, spurring riot and rebellion across one hemisphere in the middle of the night.

They played it twice, as if combing through each flicker of expression, trying to determine his state of mind, his mens rea. As if this were an actual criminal proceeding. Which, up till now, Chekov hadn’t quite apprehended.

“Do you have an opening statement, helmsman?” Mr. Spock said, in a way that was neither more nor less intimidating than usual.

“Only…” Chekov stammered a little flatly, “that I vas extrimely… frustrated… at the pointlissness of thi battle, and… I suppose… I fill back on the most… basic human enstinct, to declare von’s own edentity, against a… miningless display of… brutality?” He was looking to the others as his friends, and not his judges, as he tried to frame an argument on the spot. And though it hung together as an explanation, it hardly qualified as a legal tour de force.

Still the others seemed determined put him through his paces, or at least to make a real show of holding an inquest. Perhaps after that, Starfleet would let the whole thing go, a week or a month from now, when they’d finally had a chance to review the Enterprise’ handling of the incident.

“You understand,” Kirk said, adopting a grave tone, “that a sudden inspiration like that could lead to the downfall of an entire planetary government?”

“Eet would niver have occurred to me, Keptin,” the weapons officer said quietly, feeling stripped bare, and even a little teary-eyed at the rebuke in Kirk’s voice.

“And that millions of simple-minded, backwater peoples might be easily compelled into extraordinary action,” Dr. McCoy sighed with dismay, “by some strange figures, painted like omens, up there in the heavens?”

“Nobody said a vord about it ven the giant green hand of Apollo ingulfed de Enterprise,” Chekov bridled, “or ven Abraham Lincoln heemself magically appeared before us, out there in the vast emptiness of space!”

“We’re not a bunch of half-witted tribal natives, Mr. Chekov, are we?” Scotty joined in now, his own Edinburgh dialect rivaling the Russians for tribalism. 

“Nobody is saying the people of 892-IV are a bunch of… half-witted… tribal idiots,” Kirk sighed, glancing at the yeoman, in a way he hoped would suggest the whole comment should be stricken from the record. And right away she leaned in to the terminal to squint, and adjust a control with one hand, as if removing the chief engineer’s quote, and Kirk’s reply, from the transcript.

“In fact, they are extremely Earth-like,” Mr. Spock nodded. But it wasn’t clear if he was trying to help or hurt the reputation of two entire planets with his observation. Kirk couldn’t find a reason, in the heat of the moment, to strike that either. But he wished he could.

“We are here,” the captain plowed on, “to determine if Mr. Chekov’s… improvisation… was an act of willfulness to cause loss of property, or even loss of life, or self-determination, in violation of the Prime Directive, down on the planet.

“Ve are all scienteests,” Chekov shrugged, feeling stampeded by the unsympathetic air around him. “But sometimes ve are human scienteests. Ve counter-attack to show ve are not destroyed, ve counter-attack seemply by standing up and declaring ourselfes, and no damage done!”

“And you’re testifying in this proceeding,” Kirk’s eyes bore into the helmsman’s, “that your intent was in no way aimed at exacerbating the situation.”

“No sir!”

“No, you didn’t intend that? Or no, you’re not testifying to that?” McCoy said, sounding like he’d had enough.

Chekov looked back at the chief medical officer as if he’d gone mad.

“It just simmed to me dey vere lashing out, and ve vere svatting dem avay, and I… grew tired of bing meesunderstood.”

“It is not ‘your job’ to grow tired of being misunderstood, Commander,” Mr. Spock said.

“Yes, I understand dat.”

“But it’s not his job to sit there and watch a foolhardy display of violence directed at us, either, Mister Spock,” Scotty said. “We’d soon have no phasers, and no shields, if that went on and on.”

“But it is not his place to decide a course of action for the entire ship, or the entire Federation of Planets.” The Vulcan spoke gently, as if correcting a child, rather than ending someone’s career.

“But he has more experience on the bridge, than 90% of all Starfleet captains,” Kirk added, as miserable now as Chekov.

“Because I’m not the von reesking heez lyffe out there on de front line ewery time,” Chekov volunteered, smiling at his own good fortune.

“But aren’t you just fundamentally assuming,” McCoy interjected, cooling the mood all over again, “that the people down there have some rational, dispassionate training, or ability to hold up their superstitions— their legends and myths— to some kind of skeptical dialog? And that they wouldn’t just be consumed by some omen in the sky, and go on a rampage?”

“I don’t know,” Chekov answered, fumbling all over again.

“Just because we… ultimately managed to respond to fear with reason, doesn’t mean everyone else will do the same,” Kirk nodded somberly.

“I suppose I could go down dere and start a uniwersity, or some center of enlightenment—“ Chekov was just throwing out speculation, at this point. The others ignored him.

“If the Earth analogy holds up— at all—” Kirk said, “then we know a vast commercialism has obliterated the vision of a collective, cooperative society down there. And for its own convenience, that economic force has sought to simplify markets and business models. And computerization will only make things more desperate and dictatorial, on a business level. And in the process, the people will be shackled all over again to some meaningless labor… that steals their identity and crushes their dreams.”

As the words came tumbling out of his mouth, he made it sound like it was some kind of galactic norm or a law of physics; and that, absent an outside source of energy, or societal vision, all chaos would ensue. 

“Sometimes,” Chekov shrugged again, “ve must take action, ven ewents refuse to resolve themselves.”

“That’s right,” Kirk nodded, for he had no intention of allowing his his longtime helmsman to get in trouble over something as inconsequential as this. “It was an innovative and more or less harmless counter-attack,” he insisted. “Statistically, we know of no greater incidence of deaths that night.” 

Of course, from Chekov’s point of view, it was just a lot of pondering over his soon-to-be-finished career. It’s just how you pass the time, for older men loved to make speeches, and the finest distinctions between right and wrong.

“Gentlemen,” Spock interrupted, during an absolute silence, as if the others were still devising their next great statements, “What we are discussing is the disposition of this planet, and its billions of inhabitants.” 

They turned to the half-Vulcan, with varying degrees of reluctance, to hear an “outsider” point of view.

“Computer,” Spock intoned blandly, turning his head, as to an unseen presence.

“Working.”

“Is there historical evidence of a transfer of power on 892-IV to would explain the comparative roles of Absalom and Revolo?”

“Question includes unstated premises.”

Of course, Spock would be the last person on board to be offended by a computer. But his manner and posture jerked slightly, at being accused of incompleteness in his reasoning. It was as if he were teaching an octopus to play catch, and he wasn’t throwing enough balls. A sigh escaped his flared nostrils.

“What became of the proconsul of the old order?” First things first.

Instantly a 2-D photograph of the old Roman-style leader (whom they had met twenty Earth years ago) appeared, rendered as a 3-D hologram that floated over the center of the table like a head on a pike: round-faced like Nero, with hooded eyes like Cassius. A sneering bitterness had subsumed any greater charm. His hair was remarkably dark, despite the other signs of age and dissipation: a spot here, and a laugh line there that had turned scowlish. There was a definite punctured quality to the proceedings at the sight of him. It swept aside any further talk of Chekov’s supposed crimes.

“Laius Domenicus Albertine IV” the computer intoned with great fluidity, “found guilty by a planetary reconciliation committee on counts including murder and pillage, and sentenced to death. Sentence commuted upon appeal. Current status unknown.”

Every horrible thing that had happened lately to James T. Kirk seemed to begin or end with the phrase, “current status unknown.” Now he would have to turn over another rock, and see what crawled out.

In sickbay, Drusilla was roused from her slumbers. But you can’t expect someone who’s been heavily sedated for over ten years to be on top of her game all at once. Kirk and Absalom knelt by her side.

It would be unfair to say she had lost any of her charm from years gone by, and beside the point to think she could have held a conversation, after so many years of neglect. But there was something (perhaps simply in the tenderness they conferred upon her, with their eyes) that lent her a fragile beauty and complexity. Meanwhile, the various screens and readouts overhead showed only a cognitive numbness.

She had been changed out of her institutional white gown, into a soft green jumpsuit, that was mostly covered by a red and gray blanket, all of which had the effect of giving dignity to a dispossessed woman. 

“Really, we’ve just been detoxing her for the last day and a half,” McCoy muttered very quietly, over Kirk’s shoulder. For it wasn’t only a question of removing the last traces of sedatives, but also of re-building the decay in her brain. Her eyes finally opened, and Kirk felt he was seeing more deeply into her soul than any man should.

Perhaps the lights were not soft enough, in sickbay; perhaps Kirk and Absalom were too close; perhaps they’d been gone too long. But for whatever reason, she cried, and no one gave her an injection for it. There was no chemical cure for the ambitions of others, or for the rampant spread of the Universe, pulling us all apart, toward the great isolation, like points on a balloon, farther apart until it simply popped.

Gradually, tears also formed in the corner of James Kirk’s eyes, and Absalom was sobbing in spite of himself. McCoy and Chapel busied themselves with computer tablets or by visually inventorying the clear cabinets at the other end of the room, five meters away. Words and speeches have always been the saddles and reins of great passions, but Kirk allowed these spirits to run wild a bit longer, in his 892-IV family. He imagined he could see a distant flash of lightning in Drusilla’s eyes, which had gone wide, even as he tried to imagine every thing that might have gone wrong in her middle years. When things should have so well.

An ensign in a white jumpsuit came over with a little cup of water, and Kirk gently tried to give her a few drops. But she faded back to sleep again.

“Mamman,” Absalom said, seizing her around her arms at last, and Kirk thought he could see her shoulders go up, either in fright, or perhaps to return his embrace. 

“I’m lost,” she whispered, waking to relive some moment of truth. “All… lost.” 

“Jim, that’s enough,” McCoy interposed, for the captain was lunging in for his own new line of questioning, even as nightmares devoured her again. Kirk backed away, and rose to stand once more. Absalom was sniffling, his head twisting one way and then the other: like a seedling emerging from the earth, toward a blazing light.

The captain took his elbow and led his son from between the beds. The younger man seemed to halt, to make some declaration, to turn and lodge a formal statement against the forces of gravity and electromagnetism. Only the sigh of her breathing quelled his rage.

Beneath his blond hair, his scalp was a fire of red and blue tendrils. Greater than veins, they were like the tormented roots of trees, barely hidden by a layer of straw. McCoy and Chapel stared at the display, which was not dissimilar from the earlier colorations Kirk himself had witnessed. Christine produced a little hand-held scanner and whirred it over Absalom’s head. 

The image of Absalom as a figure of madness became indelible in that moment. He responded uneasily to Dr. Chapel’s persistent hand, floating above his head, which conformed to the shape of his skull while staying just a few centimeters away. Something had lodged in his throat, or between his teeth, something had put a saddle on him, to begin a horrible ride. His startled reaction was like a series of jerking movements, from an entirely different world.

The colors of his scalp faded down into his neck. Jim Kirk held the boy’s upper arm for support. But Absalom went the other way, and began to crumple toward the deck. Just as quickly, a chair was slid to go beneath him. And the tableau— of the sleeping madwoman, and the tortured son— became like a grim etching from a 19th Century melodrama.

“This is the only world you know,” Kirk whispered, kneeling by Absalom. “But it’s not the ‘only world.’ This is the only… justice… you know. But it’s not the ‘only justice.’ There are… a million worlds as beautiful as this. And a million kinds of justice. Far greater than what these people have done to you, and your mother. You have to trust me on this. There are a million more futures out there for you. Use up every single one of them. Live every possible life you can imagine for yourself, and for your mother. And then live them over and over again, until the greatness of your own… adapting… pulls a million other men along with you— to something even greater. Every new step you make, from here on out, is a new journey into a new life into a new future of an untold story. You have to believe that. It’s the only way to go on!”

The silence was eventually pierced by the boatswain’s whistle on the bulkhead nearby. 

“Spock here,” the familiar voice announced itself, when Kirk had risen from Absalom’s side, and gone to the grill by the doorway.

“Go ahead.”

“The damage we sustained in the latest attacks will require us to evacuate the shuttle bay for repairs, which may last up to eleven shifts, or nearly three days. Suggest you inform the Gideonites, and move them to a corridor ‘refuge situation’ on the interior decks.”

“Agreed,” Kirk sighed. At least the repairs could be made in peace and stability, even if a horde of teenaged boys, or recently teenaged boys, was crowding the halls.

But as he turned, he realized that Absalom was not ready to adapt to a waiting galaxy. At least, not till some version of local justice had been meted out. He crouched forward on the chair, fists clenched, his scalp changing to the color of orange flame.

James T. Kirk couldn’t help thinking he was losing his powers of persuasion. Or, that his own flesh and blood might simply be immune.

The young Gideonites seemed glad and bewildered to see their father appear without notice in the shuttle bay hanger, and no apparent damage above, on the great barrel-shaped ceiling. 

Amar and Connaught came up right away, to pat Kirk’s upper arms, in an echo of his own comforting gesture toward Absalom, only minutes ago.

“I know this has been less than ideal,” Kirk began, but stopped short, because these seventy young men had been living under far worse, like rebels on their own world, as much as Absalom himself. 

“But I’d like to ask you all,” he said, lifting his voice to the throng around him, “to follow me to a safer position, though much different. You won’t have as much privacy, for as long as we’re doing repairs. But you’ll meet more people. And I hope you’ll all get along.”

He explained the need to de-pressurize the hanger, and the approximate location of the suspected shield damage, under the port nacelle. And everyone looked up with interest, their eyes tracing back and forth toward where the deflectors had wavered after repeated assault. Then there were murmurs of approval from the boys, at the prospect of a new circumstance. 

The next morning, after a very quiet night with Absalom, Taleel sat alone in the cabin they’d loaned her. It wasn’t much smaller than her own room at home, in an apartment she shared with two other young women. But the Enterprise had a strange quietude to it. She stepped out into the busy corridor, and tried not to shuffle as she got herself two cups of a coffee-like beverage from the crew mess. She made her way back to the cabin, and sat down at the little table in the corner.

Instantly, she was aware that someone was standing behind her, and it wasn’t Absalom. She let out a little scream to see a red-headed young woman in a silvery cat-suit, with a purple cape, and an odd mist drifting up around her head from a metallic collar.

“Hey roommate,” Sona said, nonchalantly.

Taleel was still trying to decide if she should scream or not.

“It’s okay, I’ve been here for days— or weeks, I’m not sure.” Sona sat down next to her, and adopted the second cup of coffee as her own. Her fingers wrapped around it for warmth.

“Who are you?”

“I’m a traveler from a ruined planet. Not unlike yourself.”

“My planet’s not ruined.”

“Wait.”

“Look, you can’t be in here.”

“Calm down, I’ve been here the whole time,” Sona said, taking a very small sip, the warm vapor sizzling around the edges, against the icy gas that enveloped her face. Taleel watched with dismay, as Sona sighed with contentment. 

“Is that your stuff in the bathroom?” Taleel asked, not wanting to sound rude over the huge mess.

“Yeah, I’m starting to decay, from all the speeding up and slowing down,” Sona said, her shoulders going up, then down. The bathroom had become a laboratory of moisturizers and unguents from half of the cabins on board. In that sense, it was just like having two roommates all over again.

“So you’re like, a displaced person?”

“Well don’t say it like that,” Queen Sona rolled her eyes.

“No, it’s fine, I just— hope it’s going okay for you,” Taleel reared back from all the questions she might have wanted to ask.

“Well, it could be better, I mean I could be not related to half the guys on the ship, that would be an improvement,” Sona joked.

Taleel made a face, adopted a manner, wavering between “good for you,” and “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” 

“I mean, I have to work on that, it runs in my family, chasing after potential new lovers.”

Now Taleel was fairly certain she would wake up at any moment, and start the day over for real.

“I mean,” Sona repeated herself, “I’m glad for you and your boyfriend, that seems great.”

Now Taleel’s eyes went wide, and she edged away in her chair.

“Relax, I don’t hang around for that,” Sona lied.

“So you’re, like, invisible most of the time?”

“Speeded up. Way way way up.”

“Ugh.”

“Right?”

“How old are you?”

Sona straightened her posture, and framed her shoulders, and found just the right angle for her chin. “Old as shit.”

Taleel laughed, finally. Sona had been trying to make her laugh, and finally she did. The girl from Scalos still looked like she was in her 20’s. But not the early 20’s, any more. Which, for someone in their 20’s, is usually pretty terrific.

“So,” Sona resumed. “Can you go back? I can’t go back. I mean, I can. But, you know: ‘ruined.’”

“Right. Well, ruined too,” Taleel sighed, considering her boyfriend was probably going to be assassinated the moment he went back, and she was most certainly out of a job. That was basically ruined. And, Taleel was also just trying to be nice. Even trying to conceive of Sona’s situation seemed hopeless. 

“So what do you think is happening,” Sona asked, conspiratorially.

“Well, my boyfriend is crazy, he found his mom, and now she's—“

“In sickbay.”

“Right. And it was horrible, apparently. And he cried. And she’s insane. Or something.”

“And now he’s insane too,” Sona gasped at the sheer drama of it all.

It was Taleel’s turn to look cold and withdrawn. Finally Sona looked down, out of respect. She had gone too far. Or right to the point, which seemed to be the same thing.

“And, like, your boyfriend? Have you got one?” Taleel said, at last, unable to hide a streak of vengeance, for Sona seemed far from the romantic type. Although she liked to watch, the local girl appended.

“Nothing serious,” Sona said, after the fashion of Deela, her mother. And her father too.

“I feel like I’ve been yanked out of my life, like a helpless little animal: being adopted, and then adopted again,” Taleel sighed.

“They have this legend,” Sona confided, speaking of the Enterprise crew, apparently, “of alien abduction, where it turns out to be some kind forbidden sexual adventure in space.”

Taleel cringed, as if the human race might just be some horrible collection of mad, blundering monsters. But she tried to shake it off.

“We have this legend, too,” the girl from 892-IV said at last. “That everything works out for the best.”

Now it was Sona’s turn to look sad and withdrawn, for this was alien to her.

Since they didn’t have their own subspace communication, the First Citizen had simply beamed a little speech toward the Enterprise, halfway across their solar system. In the visual recording, she appeared more relaxed and confident than in the previous few exchanges.

“Greetings from the people of Vaccarra," she began (for this was what they called 892-IV, among themselves). “While we remain in a state of conflict, we would like to share with you the good news of our market behavior.”

When she said that, Kirk couldn’t help hearing “the good news of our lord and savior.” But this sort of parallelism always led to terrible mistakes. Unless she started handing out bible tracts, he supposed.

And, in effect, he suddenly realized she was doing just that. The first citizen’s hand came up, where Kirk could see, and woven between her fingers was an old-style stock market ticker-tape, with letters and numbers and symbols punched all along its slender length. This was their tract, dashing his optimism.

“Our traders and bargainers have responded very favorably to our battle, and we were very interested in extending it, if possible, for another round.” She smiled mischievously, as if inviting him to some naughty little party. 

“In any case, let me know. I’m sure such market forces are terribly primitive to you. But it’s been a great enhancement for peace and stability here: war up in space. Perhaps we could talk about it, at your convenience.” And the image of the very confident, bearded lady dissolved from the big screen. The dark eighth planet, 892-VIII, still loomed between them.

“I’ve been in plenty of peace talks,” the captain sighed, ironically, “but never in talks to start a war.”

“At least,” Scotty said, over Kirk’s left shoulder on the upper ring, “ye know ye’ve got something to haggle over. Armed as ye are, with the terrible threat of peace.”

“Aye,” Kirk smiled.


	15. Chapter 15

“Oh, how does that work?” Captain Kirk asked, slipping in to his usual demeanor of charming naïveté. 

The subject was a Vaccarrian (892-IV) computer, in a mountaintop hotel, thousands of kilometers from the capital city they’d visited two or three times already. The little device, on a gleaming glass table near the great windows and their stark mountain view, chattered away: spewing out a long ribbon of paper, embossed with symbols and letters and numbers. But it relied entirely on little gears and wheels and pulleys inside: resembling something between a mid-20th Century code-breaking machine, and a miniature steam engine. It seemed intensely complicated.

“Well, don’t tell me you’ve never seen a computational device before, Captain!” Lopanak smiled. She quickly opened up the cover on the thing, to reveal even more tiny gears and wheels. Mr. Spock, seated next to him, seemed confounded, as if presented with an alien joke of some kind.

This time they met in an elegant resort in the midst of the off-season. A gentle snow fell outside, beyond the great observation windows, to the farthest reaches of proud granite peaks, and beyond that lay a thin pink and orange sunset. It was the top of their world, and an occasional gust of the jet stream thundered outside.

Inside there was a sweeping balcony and broad staircase, above a sumptuous lobby. Kirk counted three stone fireplaces scattered about, the warm blaze of each seeming to create its own miniature solar system of couches and chairs and tables and lamps orbiting around it. The lone clerk at the front desk, thirty meters away, looked awkward and bored in a uniform and cap, as if he beheld his own vast creation with a sense of remorse. The only guests appeared to be Mme. Lopanak, whose attendants were over on the other end of the lobby, seated with two other members of the Enterprise landing party, both of them being security guards: Haines and a young ensign named Friedman. And that faraway group tried to make dispirited conversation, out of range of Kirk and Spock and the first citizen, who sat in their far corner overlooking a rocky chasm, veined with snow and ice. Looking out, it seemed the only options were impossible luxury, or an impossible climb up.

“Now, Captain,” Lopanak began, on a velvet couch, by the little computer on the glass. “Tell me all about your Federation of Planets.”

He complied, in spite of her vaguely satirical manner, for it was his goal anyway. He rolled out the usual history of war and ruin and first contact, and the gradual development of trust and interstellar relationships. And she inserted “ahh’s” and “mm’s,” in the little breaks in his account. He had polished the speech over the years, and knew when to include personal anecdotes, and colorful characters from this planet or that, and the occasional disappointments that all sentient beings understood from their own lives. And, he thought to himself, how often do you get such a willing audience?

“But how wonderful to have the warp engines,” she said with excitement, her scalp all aglow.

Yes, it would be wonderful if they actually worked, Kirk grumbled, inwardly. How wonderful to just leave this all behind, as he did twenty years ago, if the galaxy wouldn’t somehow shatter to bits. It was like some clever tactic by Starfleet, to give him what he wanted, until he was sick of it, of the venality of every powerful, confined servant or master or queen or panjandrum. What had begun as a grand indulgence, sending him out to revisit reluctant worlds, now seemed like clever way to get rid of an old captain in all his faded glory.

“To go zipping across the galaxy, from place to place, on all sorts of adventures.” In a way it cheered him, at least he was still somebody’s object of envy. And then it reminded him of how trapped he really was.

He was dying to ask about the primitive computers, but couldn’t quite figure out how to broach the subject. They were 40 years behind the old Earth parallel in that respect. Clearly they were on the cusp of that new phase of planetary development, and solid-state circuitry should come next, and silicon chips after that. But it almost seemed like they must have hit a dead end. It didn’t make any sense. The little box of gears and pulleys and ticker tape chattered away, but they’d never make it without micro-processors and all the next generation technology. And, frankly, he wasn’t inclined to give it to them.

Just as the warp engines had been swept off the table, by a balky onboard computer, so was his desire to lift up this new world, which likewise seemed stalled. They were mired in corruption, like Earth between great wars, and had declared themselves to be happy and balanced in that filthy state. They never had any obvious Puritanical reformations, nor the glorious rebellions against that, either. They had simply jumped from a lengthy Roman squalor to the brink of space travel. Somehow they had choked-off the usual reforms. There was no spiritual resonance, no devastation leading to internal exploration, to mirror the human journey to the stars.

These thoughts drifted around in the back of his head, while he gave the vacuum-cleaner salesman’s pitch about sharing the riches of the galaxy, and solving problems with the many combined philosophies of peace and cooperation, and a quest for goodness that lingered-on like the background radiation of the Big Bang. His stories of planetary struggles were spread out like a can of dirt sprinkled on a housewife’s carpet, and then neatly cleaned up by examples of Federation technology and wisdom.

“And then you cured the plague, and gave them a new hope!” Lopanak gushed, pleasantly cutting off yet another one of his anecdotes about a dying civilization, and the handful of virtuous natives who survived to build a bridge to the next great epoch. She gave a little clap of congratulations, and poured another cup of tea. It was as if she were letting him open up one Christmas present after another, simply to watch his joyful expression again and again.

“But that’s… not the point,” Kirk smiled, tilting his head slightly, as his eyes squinted, not unpleasantly.

“Well then, I must be a very silly person!” Lopanak smiled, eagerly re-filling his cup.

The silence that followed suggested that neither Kirk nor Spock found her silly at all.

“Perhaps you could tell us a story of your own,” the pointed-eared first officer suggested. Clearly Mr. Spock intended for her to reveal her intentions, through some well-made story, handed down over the ages of this planet.

But she demurred, being caught out by his purely clinical interest. It had been done without any human rudeness, just a very blunt offer to let her attempt to explain, even in just some metaphorical way, through her use of characters and mishaps and conflict and resolution, her own reasons for maintaining a troubling status quo.

“I suppose I should be more direct,” Lopanak said, her voice becoming more cool and flat, like the Vulcan’s. A kind of urgency— or at least efficiency— stripped away whatever hopefulness each side had brought to the table. A pair of exotic, curling earrings hung from her shell-like ears, and she leaned back slightly.

“We have a great many old weapons, floating up in our orbit, that will gradually deteriorate and become obsolete, in the next five or ten years,” she sighed, as if it were an irritation, more than a hovering doom. 

“In our recent engagement,” she resumed, speaking of the attack on the Enterprise, “we were able to reduce the danger to our planet, by aiming our orbiting warheads up at you. And thankfully you were able to dispatch them all, most efficiently.”

She glanced away, perhaps awkwardly remembering how she’d thought to break the shields of the starship, to kill them all in space. The things that didn’t actually happen were usually forgotten, despite the lingering intent.

“And of course, this is an unexpected benefit of our relationship,” she added. “In fact, we find ourselves suddenly in a position to revive our languishing munitions industry, our old war-making economy, before the New Order, for the benefit of working families all across Vaccarra.”

“And what of Drusilla, and Absalom, and Revolo,” Kirk said, already seeing the goal in sight, of another grotesque space battle, to ignite a costly military build-up.

“You may do with them as you please,” she said, with a wave of the hand.

“And what if I please to put my own son on the throne, and let him throw you into jail,” Kirk said, with equal calm. The wind outside hammered against the huge windows.

“Captain, I’m sure you are aware that our world has survived many hard turns before.”

“But you’ve somehow managed to twist each one into a little sideshow, an absurd little incident, that denies the desires, and ambitions, and aspirations of your people. You’ve stopped believing you can make things better.”

“How much better could they be?” she said, without a trace of sarcasm. It was the quietest sort of madness Kirk had ever seen.

Mr. Spock re-assembled his posture where he sat, from a sphinx-like presence, to that of a somewhat eager post-graduate student (which, of course, was how he regarded himself up to this very day).

“Our comparative analysis of this world, this civilization,” he elaborated, without wanting to put too obvious of quotation marks around the last word, “suggests the level of poverty has actually risen, in the last twenty of your years; and that the lifespan of your people has actually declined. Would it not be more logical, and efficient, to raise up your people to create cooperative systems, rather than this silent, de facto struggle for survival?”

“If we only lived by logic and efficiency, Mr. Spock,” the first citizen smiled faintly, looking up at the perfectly straight row of bangs above his Vulcan forehead, “we’d all end up by cutting our own hair. And what would be the good of that? An entire section of our economy would collapse before our very eyes,” she added with a smile, reaching for her teacup as if she were accepting a tiny award.

But if her remark was intended to intimidate or taunt, it didn’t seem to have had much of an effect. Mr. Spock merely waited for an answer to his question about the local religion.

“Death finds a way,” the first citizen sighed, to fill the absence of laughter, in a tone that was neither insistent nor apologetic. “We’ll always be able to make more families, that’s inevitable,” she shrugged. “And then, if people don’t die in war, they die in disease, or some other way that we must always scramble to address. Now, I offer you a way to let us prosper and thrive and grow, and share the benefits of that growth, with all our people.”

“By trying to destroy my ship,” Kirk finished the sentence. He could be charming, or seductive, or an absolute asshole, but he was hoping to chart a path between each of these.

“Yes, that’s right,” she exclaimed, as if Jim Kirk had suddenly had a clever idea.

“But the current means of distribution is inherently skewed away from the largest section of the population,” Spock said, contradicting her stated ambitions for Vaccarra.

“How many more people can we accommodate, Mister Spock?” she shuddered, as if he were being unreasonable, and not discussing hundreds of trillions of vicci, or dollars or francs or yuan. “With the decline in the popularity of the common deadly vices, our people are living longer and longer lives. We have simply educated ourselves into endless weary deaths. Over half a college tuition now goes to pay for all the retired professors and administrators who simply refuse to die. And if we paid the people who still work what they’re worth, we’d all be ruined. Let’s just winnow down the crowd a bit, and see what happens.”

There was another silence, orchestrated by the great gray mountaintops all around. Just as a symphony orchestra is strangely impressive in that moment of rest between movements, so all the sharp peaks seemed about to avalanche as one, under some invisible baton.

“You can off-load all those old professors and administrators to new worlds,” Kirk tried yet again, absolutely convinced of his own position. “You can educate your young people at no cost in our academies, and send them off to a dozen worlds apiece. And when they come back, they’ll be more content, in a life-sustaining way, than they’d ever be here, under the cruel bonds of one-world rule.”

“One-world rule was something we begged for, for centuries, Captain.” There was a slight pause, as Kirk became optimistic again.

“And now you’re making your planet’s… next step, Madame First Citizen.”

She began to rise, seeming slightly unsteady in that historic moment. And both Spock and Kirk rose as well, as if to catch her, should she falter. That’s when they noticed a stream of blood, pouring down the side of her face, as if she’d been shot. The chattering little computer box had fallen silent a moment or two before.

Across the lobby, the members of her delegation were standing up and staring. One of them gasped as Kirk and Spock laid her body down on the long sofa. The Enterprise security detail was rushing toward them.

“Probably should not have mentioned the free education,” Mr. Spock said ruefully, standing and straightening his red tunic.

“Probably should not have mentioned the free haircut,” Kirk replied, in his haste. Once again he’d have find some other Vaccarrian leader to evangelize, who’d be terrified of meeting the exact same fate. They looked across the lobby and up to the balcony: trying to figure out where the shot had come from, silent as a dagger.

In a second, as Lt. Haines and Ensign Friedman reached the sofa, Kirk and Spock were heading the other way, vaulting up the wide staircase, to a height as great as the highest mountain peaks. One ran down one side of the balcony, and then turned, and both ran down the same line of doors to rooms and meeting halls. By now Spock had his tricorder out, and Kirk was ahead of him one moment, and then behind him the next, as they tried door after door. Soon they had isolated one or more life-form readings, and began kicking against a large double-door. That wasn’t working, so Kirk held a hand-phaser against the lock mechanism. He leaned away as a tiny red ball of lightning tore it open.

“They are too old for that shit,” Haines whispered, down below, at the foot of the staircase, to no one in particular. The two senior officers disappeared down a service hallway. As the ensign collected forensic data, the lieutenant contacted the Enterprise, to come into beaming range once more.

“I have to go back down there,” Absalom fumed, unable to sit any longer with Taleel, in a corner of the crew mess where they’d been for hours. He started to pace along one wall, but felt foolish in the presence of the ship’s ensigns, from engineering; and a separate table of science officers. For a few minutes, he ended up leaning against one bulkhead, and then another, on the other side of Taleel.

“No, you don’t,” she sighed. “We’d both be thrown into prisons, far apart.”

“I hate this,” he grumbled.

“You just miss your old life, the solitude, the rails, the loud nights,” she smiled.

“And you.”

She smiled again, for he had a gift for saying the right thing.

“My mother,” he said, after a minute, rubbing his scalp, which had turned dark again. 

“She’s better off up here. And so are you.”

“This is the time,” he hissed, leaning forward, in quiet anguish.

“For what?” she implored, growing weary of trying to hold him back from some thing or another.

“A grand march, a protest that would grow and amass and turn a hand to heal the world.”

“Like a plow, to bury anyone in your path,” she sighed.

“Why would anyone be in my path?” he said, with a great pretense of mercy.

“Because they remember the centuries of slavery and slaughter and wickedness and betrayal and crookedness and scheming and… shall I go on?”

“That’s nothing to do with me,” he said, shaking his head very slightly, and looking over the heads of the crewmen across the long cafeteria, at rows of tables.

“The dance hall rebel,” she smiled. To amuse her, Absalom improvised a tango-like flourish, but it seemed angry and harsh. She wondered if she could ever really keep him safe.

“I’m the darling of old men everywhere,” he said, to remind her of his importance, despite the change in governments.

“Yes, I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that,” she nodded, more out of embarrassment for him, than from jealousy.

“You can’t fund a revolution without money,” he explained, for the one thousandth time.

“Then I assume you have a huge,” her eyes glanced down around his crotch, “wad of cash, for all your trouble.”

“As a matter of fact,” he grinned wickedly, and reached down inside his trousers, “look at this!” His hand came back up again with quite a respectable stack of paper money, each one a 1,000 vicci note, suggesting he’d been changing smaller amounts into larger ones at the bank, and adding to the stack, from the donations to the son of the Old Order. She gasped.

“The crowd you hang out with, and you’re walking around with that?”

He shrugged invincibly.

“Every time they arrest me, I just peel one off, and I’m free again.”

“I’m sure,” she said, looking away again.

“And you know, I fund a considerable network in the cutpurse and larceny sector,” he added, as though it were a large and respectable mutual fund. “And, I make speeches,” he added, more seriously, with an accidental note of nobility, for somehow that was the embarrassing part to admit.

“About ‘how wonderful the future is’,” she sighed again, more dispirited than before. 

“I can’t help it, it’s what I believe!”

“It’ll do you in,” she muttered, not even listening.

“Probably just step out in front of a train,” he reassured her, pantomiming a slightly less grisly end. The part where he turned and saw the giant locomotive right over his shoulder, mowing him down, was funny enough to make a nearby table of crewmen chuckle.

“I wish I could grow a beard,” Taleel said, changing the subject, dismayed by her own personal fate for a change, pulling her long hair around her jawline like a shawl

“The women in your family will never be towering figures of history,” he concluded, waving her away with the imitation of a royal gesture, as if facial hair was the key to female immortality everywhere in the universe. Finally he sat down across from her, his performance of the day concluded, his momentary anguish swept away.

A security guard, looking faintly amused at something entirely different, stood in the mess doorway and ushered in six or eight young men in yellow jumpsuits. They looked strangely familiar to Absalom, though he couldn’t quite place them. Till now, of course, they’d all been down in the lower hull, sequestered from the rest of the people on board. They lumbered in to the cafeteria, like some over-aged Vienna boys choir, unfamiliar with their surroundings.

Taleel watched him watching them. She knew who they were, for she talked to people. She wasn’t like Absalom, who only talked about himself. She simply hadn’t seen the point of dragooning her erstwhile boyfriend off into a band of—

“Excuse me,” Absalom was suddenly reaching across the path of the third or fourth fellow, in a line for the food processors, each of them armed with trays and silverware. “Could you hand me a napkin there? There’s a good fellow.”

Without thinking twice, the other young man did as he was asked. Smooth as a cat, Absalom was up and insinuating himself into the ranks of the Gideonites, who were happy to be eating, and entertained by someone new. 

And in that moment, a revolution had begun.


	16. Chapter 16

Mr. Spock stood at the very bottom of a stairwell alongside Laius Domenicus Albertine IV, the sour-faced old proconsul, in front of a heavy steel door. The Vulcan held his tricorder up between them, keeping his face down, as if to study some important data, while they waited below a clunky video surveillance camera. The Vaccarrian looked as smug and disdainful as ever by his side.

Finally the big door buzzed, and they swung it open. James T. Kirk stepped out of the holographic projection of the proconsul’s head, which floated briefly a half-meter in front of the tricorder: snarling for just another fraction of a second without a body to hold it up. The two Starfleet commanders brandished their phasers and hurried after the life-form reading they’d caught a glimpse of, up in the glass-walled hotel. 

And now they were deep inside the mountain. 

“The readings are deteriorating,” the Vulcan mused, following the human under a long string of dim lights overhead.

“You mean we lost them,” Kirk said, slowing down. But they had come this far, and reason requires a forward path. But it was as if they were trapped in some never-ending nightmare of tunnels and lights going on forever.

Finally there was an end to this particular tunnel, and a perpendicular choice lay before them. Barely hesitating, the science officer nodded to the right, and they hurried on again, till they came to another big metal door. There was no camera, and certainly not any guard, so they retreated a meter or so, to melt a hole in it.

They had seen large computers before, of course. There was a large one on the Enterprise, but it wasn’t anything like this. Cautiously, they entered an airplane hanger-sized room, busy as a stitching factory with pistons and belts and wheels and gears, all churning away like mad, figuring out some problem, like a vast automated series of abacus machines, some parts exposed, others just rattling away inside metal cabinets. It made no sense, at least at first, so much effort and racket and churning away. And (as they walked around the perimeter), one single little strand of ticker tape was slowly, unevenly ratcheting out of it all, into a basket of a long string of paper, at the other end.

“They’ve rushed to meet the future, when the future was waiting for them all along,” Kirk said, of the ridiculous machine, and of themselves. 

Purely out of habit, Kirk raised his phaser up to destroy the grand lie. But a familiar voice stopped him.

“Jim, I wouldn’t.”

It was John Merik, erstwhile captain of the USS Beagle.

“Don’t look so surprised,” the first citizen smiled, speaking loud over the din. “But you left in such a hurry. I suppose some explanation is in order.”

“Yes,” Kirk nodded, surrendering his weapon and communicator, as the guards approached them, and Spock did the same. 

A few minutes later, they were sitting in a much quieter room, a private study that looked out through casement windows, over a forested Swiss-style valley below. They were insulated from the winds by thick, wavy glass, and tapestry-style draperies, and soft eyelet curtains inside of that.

“The proconsul had his political friends in the old Senate, and I had mine,” Merik was saying as a young waiter brought them drinks. They sat in their plush chairs, surrounded by books and lamps and souvenirs from all around this particular globe. 

“And, as you can imagine, he already knew the fastest way to kill a human, by that point. One quick jab should have done the trick. But I’d had a splenectomy my first year out of Starfleet,” he said, looking down and gesturing to the mid-left of his abdomen. “And when they grow in the new one, it’s always on the other side…” his hand slid across to the right.

“So all you had to do was play dead,” Kirk said. 

“He was a nice man,” Merik smiled faintly, managing to avoid a Vaccarrian smirk.

“But neither you nor the proconsul could ever be seen again,” Spock said at last.

“Being seen, Commander Spock, is all wrapped-up in being the lie, in these parts,” Merik said, his smile tinged with sadness. “The lie of public service, the lie of collectivism. You don’t even need logic and science and all that to run a planet. People don’t want that. They want to believe in magic, in conjuring: turning themselves into something completely different, and powerful, with absolutely no effort at all, on their parts. Whole religions have been founded on a lot less.”

“And so Madame Lopanak had to die,” Kirk concluded, with an air of resignation, knowing Merik was never going to allow her derail his philosophy in one sitting.

“Well, we really do like the idea that our people won’t put any particular effort into changing themselves. It really works to our advantage,” Merik smiled. He had gone completely native.

“And anyone who gets in the way is mad, or ridiculous, or…”

“Dead?” Merik finished Kirk’s sentence for him. There had been something empty about him, twenty years ago, in grappling with the sacrifice of his crew; and now his eyes blazed at the thought that he had turned out just fine in spite of it. He was something else entirely now, though not for wishful thinking.

“I ‘officially’ died a ridiculous death,” Merik nodded, and a self-effacing laugh escaped his lips. “At least by the standards of this world.” 

And then he turned very serious indeed. “But who’s laughing now?” 

He looked out across the valley, where dark green fir trees grew uphill, before the mountains became too steep. Kirk watched him, watching the fjord outside.

“And you’d like me to dismiss all that talk, all that… idealism… as some kind of a joke?”

Merik’s eyes narrowed slightly.

“No, I don’t expect that,” the secret leader sighed, for he was already condemning Kirk to die again. It was a familiar sensation, looking into the eyes of an executioner. But it emanated from a face out of Kirk’s own past. 

“That contraption— that huge computer of yours,” the captain of the Enterprise said, changing the subject, “what good is it, compared to what you had on Earth?”

“Down here, Jim, I’m the computer. Besides, ‘that contraption’ works on a rudimentary level, it even forecasts the weather, based on our satellites. “Gradually, we’ll enter a more sophisticated era, where everybody has a computer. And then? Every man’s identity will become like his own kind of fame. His narrow strip of celebrity. That tiny fame then becomes our data. And that data becomes our power. Just like Earth.”

“You must have been expecting our return, this whole time,” Kirk said, changing the subject.

“Actually no. And I was right, till now. We’ve just been lost in the shuffle of all those brave new worlds. I suppose I relied on your own poetic nature to leave it all behind, to allow things to return to their natural balance. Was that a mistake? I’m not so sure.” He didn’t laugh, for it might have forced an ugly turn. But there was a very slight cognitive “break” in his civilized veneer, in the twitch of a proconsul’s scowl.

An aide hurried into the room, and spoke quietly in Merik’s ear. A row of old-fashioned televisions, with cathode-ray picture tubes, was switched on: each to a different “channel.” But all five showed the same scene, from different angles.

On the other side of the planet, the nighttime rallies were turning to daytime marches, on trash-strewn streets. In the midst of all that, on the front edge of a large public fountain, Absalom stood over the crowd: shaking his arms like a furious conductor. Young men in jumpsuits, green and orange and yellow, were also materializing on empty patches of ground, from the Enterprise. It added to the hundreds that were crossing into the park from the office buildings above.

Like magic, a microphone and loudspeakers appeared around the ‘son of Merikus.’ At least it told Kirk where Sona had been, moments, or hours before, depending on your point of view. And that was how their escape from the starship was managed. In the morning light, control began to shift. Armed with a microphone, his image broadcast everywhere, Absalom suddenly had a voice for the crowd and the world.

“You must be very proud,” Kirk said, sensing that the opposite was true.

“I am, actually,” Merik insisted, looking down, reassembling his nobility, as the three men watched from their chairs. Then the captain of the Beagle got up, and looked out over the valley again, as village lights glowed down between the trees. On the televisions, Absalom talked and joked and shouted, in turns.

“He scored off-the-charts on every test of intelligence, endurance, and what you might call ‘conspiratorial acumen.’ That’s a thing that’s woven into the testing on this world, or used to be,” he added. “And that was the one advantage I had, coming here, accidental though it was. I had read Machiavelli, and they’d never even heard of him. Can you imagine?” He peered out through the curtains, his illuminated expression cut into complex, gem-like fragments by the lace panels trimming the window.

“He wasn’t interested in any of that. And in a way, he was right— the New Order tried to leave it all behind. It had to. I designed it for him,” Merik added, shame-faced and proud in the same instant. For his was a conspiracy of love that failed, for lack of practice or consistency.

“Looks like you finally get your wish,” Kirk said. 

On one of the televisions, a reporter was trying to encompass the crowd around Absalom in the distance, gesturing behind him with a sweeping hand— only to turn and find the mob had grown even larger, at the start of the day. And seeing that double-arm-sweep irked Merik even more, as it represented a further disruption in the business cycle.

“Yes. Too bad he won’t survive it.” He turned slowly toward Kirk. “Nor will you, I’m afraid.”

Up on board the Enterprise, Mr. Scott was looking anguished over the transporter console, for a change of pace. Commander Kyle and an Andorian lieutenant had both control boards opened up, and stared into a handheld scanner, as if watching the progress of a single atom traveling around inside. Doctor McCoy half-slouched against a nearby bulkhead, trying to be at least a bit sympathetic.

“It’s almost like you had seventy or eighty little Jim Kirks running around, and each one, trying to pilot the ship all at once,” the ship’s chief medical officer sighed. None of the engineers acknowledged his remark. Even the steady hum of the idling particle generators had fallen silent. There was no buzzing sound, to harmonize with the impatience they felt. Space seemed very oppressive, without the usual background noise of the ship.

“Well, they’re all down on the planet now, if that’s any consolation,” Scotty finally answered, just to be polite.

“I’d do a head-count just to be sure, or you’ll find one sitting in the captain’s chair!” McCoy grumbled. With the Scalosian girl everywhere at once, it seemed anything was possible. Scotty stood upright, and touched the little comm-board along the upper edge of the console.

“Security, give me a location on each of our passengers.”

“Yes, Mr. Scott,” a voice answered. Then, a moment later, “the only ones still on board are the prisoner Revolo, and the native girl, and the patient in sickbay, Mr. Scott.”

“Might as well send them down too,” Scotty muttered, as they tried to get back to normal. But with the transporter in mid diagnostic scan, and the shuttle bay off-limits, that didn’t seem likely. In fact, he had half a mind to leave the transporter disassembled like this, just to keep a lid on things. If the captain, and Mr. Spock weren’t down there already.

“There’s a tiny group at the top who matters,” Absalom was shouting into a microphone.

“And everybody else!” the crowd shouted back, primed and rehearsed and inflamed, hurling full-throated sarcasm at the tall buildings a half mile or so behind the fountain.

“There’s the planners and investors,” he added, taunting them again.

“And everybody else!”

“There’s the parliament, and the police, and the first citizen…”

“And everybody else!”

It was the refrain, in what had become an epic poem, and the verses told how little had changed under the New Order. Half of the mob seemed to be wearing office clothes, and half was dressed from the night before. Their number was growing to the tens of thousands. But he was gradually being drowned out by car horns from the jammed causeway nearby, and fire engines and police sirens that began to wail downtown. 

Whether the car horns on the road were part of the same noise curtain being drawn on the protest, as the fire engines and police sirens, was impossible to tell— traffic had been stalled for hours, near the ocean. Only now the drivers were laying on the horns.

In any case, some of the crowd, near the traffic jam, began rocking stuck cars back and forth, because they couldn’t hear Absalom over the noise; while others at the fountain began streaming toward the office buildings, drawn by the sound of the sirens. That’s when the real riots began, and fires soon raged through the business district.

A phalanx of riot police began marching down the main street between tall office buildings, forcing rioters the other way. Brash young people began throwing things at the cops, for their futures seemed at stake. Tear gas grenades were lobbed in one direction, by the police, only to bounce back, as if by magic, from inside the ranks of the mob.

Back at the fountain, Amar and Connaught were trying to hold back the crush of people— everyone wanted to speak, everyone was grabbing for the microphone. And maybe it was just a personal failing that Absalom had such a hard time giving it up. But the massed energy, the bottled-up anger, was turning ugly. And these three sons of Kirk were being dragged down in the violence.

From Sona’s point of view, it was all extremely quiet. Walking through a vast portrait of chaos, frozen in time, was colorful and interesting, but a little like being trapped in the pages of a book, as history itself unfolded: like being the mysterious “woman in blue" in the old Earth film “Medium Cool.” She’d stumbled on that historical documentary weeks ago, up in the Enterprise, during a search for a less restrictive way of slowing her down, in that silvery suit, in her walking freezer unit. Otherwise, at this rate, speeding up and slowing down, she would be thirty, then fifty, and then eighty, before she knew it.

Now, strolling through the frozen carnage on Vaccarra, the young queen of Scalos picked up another glowing tear gas grenade with a pair of hubcaps, and trudged back through the screaming faces, across the ragged line of dispute, and in between the uniformed policemen. She tried to look wan and elegant, like the blue-dressed, balletic woman in the film, as she wove between the shields and helmets. Arched-back, chin held high, that mysterious Earth woman unified different story elements together, in the riots at a 1968 political convention. Sona imagined this was all a movie, or a single shot of a movie, with trails of tear gas grenades frozen overhead, beneath the train tracks that formed a rusty canopy over the downtown streets.

For a while, in between grenade toss-backs, and flying trash cans suspended overhead, she just leaned against a huge iron trestle, and hummed a wandering tune. Finally she made her way back to the park, and the fountain, where she was surprised to see the situation had deteriorated in just a few hours. 

Nearer the ocean, small helicopters were frozen in the air over the crowd. Armed policemen sat inside the round plexiglass bubbles up there, behind dark glasses, looking implacable.

She wished the two young women from security, who’d caught her before, were here to help out. But Sona was accustomed to doing things herself. Like untying a big knot of hair, she patiently extricated Absalom, Amar, and Connaught, one by one, from the fountain waters, through the occasional spray of water, hanging motionless in the air like glistening round diamonds. One by one, she went through the exhausting process of dragging each young man to the other side of the fountain, and hid them under the lip of the largest basin, upon the granite pavers. Whatever happened next was their problem. 

“I’m not bailing you out again, Amar,” she said, gasping for air, and pointing her finger right into the Gideonite boy’s silent, desperate, shouting face. And,

“I’m only doing this for Taleel,” she muttered dismissively as she dragged Absalom through the water. He looked kind of dead, frankly, or resigned and exhausted, from being pulled down in some moment of social hysteria.

“I have no idea who you are,” she huffed, standing over the last member of the trio. “But I assume we’re from the same gene pool, so fuck off,” she finally grunted, dragging the impossible weight of the jump-suited Connaught around the big round ornament in the center of the park, its cataracts frozen like abstract sculptures: as gentle and graceful as the frozen mob all around had become hectic and feral. Connaught’s figure rolled on top of the other two, like a dried autumn leaf. It was a hard business, being the child of James T. Kirk.

There had been a layer of smoke in the air, and the helicopters were still frozen overhead the whole time. A few of the men inside were leaning out, machine guns exposed under their arms. These copters were much lower, suspended above the crowd, but not low enough to reach up at them. 

For a long moment she considered it to be, merely, an interesting problem. But soon there would be far too many invisibly fast bullets to pluck out of the air.


	17. Chapter 17

She went behind a tall office building, to a modest storefront church, which seemed huddled in the shadows under the tracks. That was where she’d found the sound equipment earlier, and now she went rummaging around in their basement. The whole building was wide open, but she wasn’t finding the rope she wanted, to corral large numbers of people, nor any sort of shielding that would be strong enough to deflect the force of the bullets, which certainly seemed destined to come hailing down on the crowd soon. 

There was a phone book in the front office and, flipping back and forth, as near as she could figure, there was a hardware store less than a mile away, on the other side of downtown. It was too far, and by the time she went there and back, to get a piece of rope, it’d be too late. But then she decided to chance it, and set off running.

By the time she got back to the park, with the longest rope she could carry, the men up above were leaning out, and beginning to raise their machine guns. She didn’t understand anything about alien machinery, but what little she had learned about men was more than enough to quicken her pace.

She had the church ladder, and the rope, and a broom she could probably wave at, but not reach them. 

On Scalos, the volcano destroyed nearly everything she knew. She tried to remember what had survived that blast. The planet turned itself inside out, having ruptured its inner self, and sent a plume of liquid rock out against the atmosphere: a fist of fire that may have even broken orbit. She imagined she could become that fist of fire, herself, if she could find a long enough ladder. Things were so much simpler when she was all alone.

But she was finding the people, wherever she went, each had something magical about them. Must have been the sheer fact of growing up in total isolation. Or something hopeful she inherited from her father. Everyone was so completely different, from the little world she knew. If they survived, they’d each do wonderful things.

Then again, every person she met seemed to be magical in the wrong way, at the wrong time, for the wrong reason. It was maddening. She resolved, if she survived, to look for the right potential at the right moment, when it finally swung into view.

She was squeezing through the frozen crowd again, in the big public park, trying to move toward the fountain. Anyone who felt thrown off balance by her unseen figure, dragging a wooden ladder and a large coil of rope, would simply attribute it, in the “moment,” to the rest of the mob all around. By the way, it was impossible to see any potential at all, when everyone was a statue. Young people with neon colored hair, in leather and torn shirts, some frozen in shouting, some listening eagerly, mixed with others about her own age, the boys in suspenders and funny shaped neckties, and girls with great swooping hair and colorful raincoats worn over comically prim office dresses. The injury from having your foot banged by a rattling ladder would be so sudden and brief, compared to the rush of your own personal role in this new political futurism, and all the million little sensations of pride and glory, would flood out that sharp pain.

Finally she was under the helicopters, and the people were beginning to notice and scatter away, though they were impossibly slow. Instantly she wondered if she’d make things worse by interfering, as the huge throng seemed like it was already trying to escape the machine guns overhead, that tilted out of the pilot’s bubbles like black antennae. Heads were turned up, in anger and recrimination, while the helmeted, sunglass-wearing faces in whirlybirds stared grimly down. She could never get all these people far enough away, was her first thought. And her second was, there was no other way.

It seemed like the trick would be to tie one end of the rope around the wrist of somebody on the back side of the helicopters, and wrap the length of the rope all the way around the front edge of a large group, and just pull, to try to force them backwards, out of the reach of the weapons above. It was hard enough managing one frozen person at a time, finding a fast motorcar to do the job would take even longer. And the rope wasn’t that long to begin with. She was only herding fifty or sixty people, as she tied it off at one end, around one young man’s wrist; and arbitrarily squeezed her way back behind the forward-most copter, frozen in mid-air above. She couldn’t look at the faces on what would become the ‘wrong side’ of the rope-line. 

And they were barely moving at all, as if it weren’t a question of saving or damning, but fanning the flames of confrontation in the most horrific way possible. Maybe, she thought with a pang of horror, the crowd was not moving not at all, maybe she was just imagining they were leaning back, or changing balance, as she pulled her end of the rope, out from under the helicopters. She was trapped in between instances, in twenty thousand other peoples’ panic attack, at a moment survivors would live over and over for the rest of their lives. It seemed like none of them understood it yet. The machine guns were farther out, under the blurring blades.

She could see that some of the helmeted police were in the crowd now, shoving their way through, a squadron here, another over there, but only on the fringes, away from the fliers. Absentmindedly, she looked to the fountain, thirty meters away, where it seemed like all the jumpsuit boys were frozen in a huge fistfight with police, who had begun swinging black clubs. Till now, the Gideonites had blended in so much with the Vaccarrians, she had barely noticed till this latest stage of the demonstration.

A kind of desperation seized her, and she tied her end of the rope on to someone else’s wrist, hoping everyone would just be dragged to safety by their own panic. Then she set to work on a totally different, almost comical strategy. One by one she unstrapped the shining helmets from the nearest policemen (white out here in the park, as opposed to the black ones in the city jail, from Kirk’s first night there) and began putting them onto the heads of the frozen Gideonites. She still barely recognized most of them, but they usually had that same boyish face, and tousled golden hair, in the frozen roar of the prop wash from above, and eyes ablaze in the moment. It was a total prank, which maybe showed a flair for psychological warfare, at best. She did this for the better part of an hour, looking up to see where this helicopter or that one was provocatively dangling its weaponry farther out over the mob, as an insect-like warning finger.

So now the police would be on to her, or at least have to make sudden changes in tactics. The white hats were suddenly not the “white hats” anymore. She was further inspired to handcuff some of the police to some of the protestors, or to each other; though she could see her time was quickly running out. It was just done to be funny, like the sight of Earth protesters putting flowers in rifle barrels, in videos tagged along with that “Medium Cool” film. But gradually she realized the handcuffing might have had a provocative effect on the sentries up above.

She could see a blurry blossom of orange flame had sprung out of one weapon, at least thirty feet up in the air. The first audible sign of an explosion of gunfire was yet to follow, like very slow thunder in the vague yowling of timelessness. The crowd hadn’t seemed to react to it yet, as she handcuffed one young policeman to a punked-out young woman, busy chanting with her friends. The cop was looking the other way. Soon there would be frantic running, and tears, and bloodshed.

“I now pronounce you, man and wife,” she sighed, like in the Earth stories, as the handcuffs “clicked,”

Other machine guns began to thunder deeply, and she insisted to herself that they were mainly firing up into the air, over the heads of the rioters and police. But not far above. Faces were one-quarter turned in surprise, at all the sudden changes.

Two of the Gideonites had picked up her wooden ladder to push against the riot police, after the helmets had all been switched, and their plain starship jumpsuits resembled uniforms much more than before. During all that, a fight was going on in the fountain, arms and fists thrown up, and splashes of water trailing behind them like crystalline comet tails. Even at this impossibly slow rate, Sona still wished she could stop it.

Could any one of them have silenced the guns that aimed lower and lower, as each stream of dark bullets hung thirty feet overhead? She had to keep reminding herself that murders hadn’t happened yet, and it was still the early moments of disaster. Part of her insisted on trying to organize her own urgent impulses.

All she had done was cast dominance into doubt, and bind together the people who had thought themselves unalterably opposed to the strong or the weak; to the foolish or the wise. But why should the police be allowed to surrender their own humanity, by putting on a thick helmet? If she had known James T. Kirk for decades, instead of days, she’d see it was like one of his own world-saving inspirations. As it was, mostly uninformed about her own lineage, she only knew she felt powerfully nudged, by some unseen hand herself, shepherding her this way and that through the mob, at an even faster pace.

There was a haze in the air, as there had been in the downtown streets, and she squinted to try to understand every crazy thing that seemed to be happening. It should have been much easier. Everything should seem very simple and calm easy to sort. But this was a prideful, giddy march to ruin. Her head was pounding, she could feel herself aging, the electrified nerves in her arms and legs twisting into fiery braids of anguish.

And now she could see Absalom was back up on the fountain, high up and thirty meters away, facing toward the tall buildings: to shout above the helicopters, holding on to the tallest spire at the center of the water sculpture, above the fighting below, in the middle of the forest of upraised fists across the length of the park. His free hand was raised as well, but in a kind of hollow way, as if he had just set free some invisible dove of peace, or tried to touch it for good luck. 

From here it seemed like madness on his face, tilted toward the sky; or a look of pure bliss: he was somehow healed and hearty, what she could see of his face glowed with strength and promise. This had been a young man raised in squalor and abandon, surviving on his wits in the open, mostly alone like herself. Poverty itself is an accelerated life, that throws away one’s youth. But in his final moment, arms upraised, he had found a youthful strength.

Kirk and Spock also stood exposed: high up in the dark and snow and wind. They were all the way back up on a mountaintop, on the roof of the grand hotel. Haines and the ensign stood close by. All four of their deep red uniforms had automatically puffed-up against the cold, while Merik faced them, looking harsher as each gust of ice pelted at him. 

Everything had been said, and now he was getting ready to board a very large helicopter, whose fuselage resembled that of an old Earth B-29 prop plane, a silvery “Flying Fortress,” but without large wings. It glinted in the night, in the flash of helipad lights, at each corner of the large pad. The airship’s gigantic double rotors on top ground heavily, cycling round and round, its twin sets of blades, at front and rear, occasionally matching the rhythm of the landing lights, as the engines whined.

“I’m not very good at goodbyes,” Merik shouted, over the engines. “But I’m sure you know that already!” The guards closed in on the landing party.

And just like that, Lt. Haines fiercely knocked down two of them, seizing a machine gun that clattered to the tarmac, and setting it ablaze above their helmets for certainty. The copter seemed very quiet by comparison, after the roar of the weapon: keening mechanical sighs and wheezes and the chunk-chunk-chunk of the two great engines. Behind her, the ensign was struggling with the other guards, closer to the jagged boulders of the cliff. It looked like they had stumbled into an awkward, “call your bluff” moment, where the ensign seemed willing to throw the other two dangerously off-balance, in spite of their greater numbers, if only to subdue them.

And just like that, all three went tumbling off into space, into the darkness below the boxes of light that blazed their navigation beams across the valley. Dots of snow flew silent across each beam of light, like tiny pantomimes.

“Friedman!” Haines shouted, and then waved the muzzle of the machine gun back at her own two prisoners, her face set in pained severity. She glanced down once, into the pit between great mountains. There was a bitter kind of wonder in her look, at the unjust fate of every redshirt.

When she turned back, she raised the weapon at Merik, climbing the steps of the grand airship, with complete ease and fluidity. She aimed and fired one single shot, just like rifle range, as he was closing the helicopter’s main hatch behind him. Then the big shining metal door swung shut, forty meters away. She knew she must have got him, but everything proceeded as if she’d missed. 

“Son of a bitch,” she snarled.

Kirk and Spock were rushing hard on Merik’s heels, and now their boots jammed into the doorframe behind the cockpit, one big step up from the landing pad. 

The great engines howled, and the whole thing shook free of the surface, with a sound like the rallying shofar of ancient Earth armies, as the rotors began to spin faster. The flashing lights at each corner of the pad formed jagged swirls of light up into the coalescing blades, as the engines roared. Haines reached between the two men, thrusting the rifle in the gap between their boots, widening it just an inch or so, and daring the shining leviathan to escape with her arm snapped off inside.

The air seemed to rush out of them, as they struggled against the door, in the flashing light. The sheer volume of the airship tilted over them like a silver tidal wave, and the landing gear began hanging limp: hydraulics squealing under the engine sound, as the roar of their salvation fought against the pounding of their boots. The ship was rising, and they were locking elbows together, while the mad pilot up in front scooped laterally away from them. The starboard side rose suddenly, and the blades snapped over their heads like a million invisible whips.

Spock’s fingers were up in the top half of the hatch, and Haines was still grasping at the lower half, with Kirk holding them both together in between, as if they would slingshot him through with some mad, final kick. In an impossible moment, his legs came up and he was hammering against the door with both boots, though he was also shoving himself out into empty space each time, with equal but opposite energy, and each blow against the steel. The mountain fell away, all shadows and grey ice and jagged rock in the dark. And he was jamming away at the hatch with each kick, hating the whole contrary universe.

His boots smashed against the hatch, and that’s when Kirk realized they’d all go flying out into the abyss if he got his way. If the door swung inward, Spock and Haines would lose their grip on the edges, and Merik’s work would be done for him. But such is the fate of all men: you get what you want, and then you paid the price for it. A knot of resolve formed itself inside his brain, and the man who’d saved the Earth a half a dozen times banged harder. When the hatch had finally given way, and the ship had swung again, Spock was pulling him in. Kirk managed to link his left knee under Haines’ shoulder, and the three arrived on board in a breathless heap.

Kirk and Spock scrambled up to the cockpit, while Haines lay on the deck. The great craft was still rising between jagged mountaintops, and both pilots had to be knocked out (in the usual way) and clicked out of their safety belts, then dragged out of their seats, all in a matter of seconds. But by that time, the double-rotor helicopter was tilting thirty degrees to port, and going sideways towards forty. A couple of meters behind them, Lt. Haines’ machine gun was pointed very steadily at the two stewards in bloodied white tunics, crouched in surprise, in the middle of the aisle. The body of the earth man John Merik lay between them all, felled minutes ago, by a single shot to the head.

They flew for twelve hours, and Kirk bandaged up Mr. Spock’s right fingers, and bound and gagged the pilots, before they set down in the great Romanesque capital early the next morning. It all seemed more or less back to normal after the rioting. They had flown from night into predawn before landing in the great flat city on the sea, studded with tall buildings. Police barricades were up around the park, and traffic was light around the main causeway nearby. There was a throng of what appeared to be exclusively female observers, women in everyday clothes, standing north, across a wide intersection. And you could sense that cars were slowing down to look at the great fountain, as if something remained: the ghosts of great events, at the beginning of a new chapter in the planet’s history.

A throng of policemen approached the airship, as the blades were slowing. But when they got inside, they found only the two stewards, and the pilot and co-pilot, along with the body of the former First Citizen on board.

James T. Kirk went straight to sickbay, where the medical team was removing bullets from the surviving Gideonites. Mr. Scott had managed to track the large helicopter’s abrupt departure from the mountains, and spotted the Vulcan life-readings, and beamed them a ship’s communicator once they’d wrapped up the shipboard diagnostic. Now, Kirk worked his way from one bed to the next, and bent down to comfort sons lying on the floor, stepping around them after each short visit. There wasn’t much blood to be seen, only smears of it on the edges of the beds, as the doctors and nurses tossed machine gun rounds into flat polished pans, and closed wounds and murmured into little computer mics on their shoulders.

Finally he found Connaught, laid up with half his face bandaged, half his left side too, including his arm. He was barely awake, but gradually answered, when softly questioned.

“We thought we could protect Absalom,” he sighed. “So he switched his clothes with Amar.”

“It’s all right,” Kirk said quietly, allowing him to fall back to sleep. But the boy was reexamining it all in his mind, and spoke again. 

“We got swept off, down onto the ground, by the wind…” It was how he interpreted Sona’s intervention. “And they switched, and Amar tried to wave everybody away, away… And now he’s dead,” Connaught whispered, sadly.

“Amar? Or Absalom?”

Connaught looked back at Kirk, as if his father had misapprehended him. And then he lapsed into a kind of exhaustion, eyes closing. 

When Kirk stood up, McCoy was standing behind him, looking very still. And his voice was very gentle, which was so much worse than usual.

“Amar?” Kirk said, after the chief medical officer had called the captain, by his name.

“I’m afraid so, Jim. Severe trauma caused by metal rounds, from above.”

When David Marcus died, people told Kirk he’d stumbled backward, and fallen to the deck, like Paul thrown down from the donkey. Now, Jim Kirk felt the whole ship turning around, as he left the side of the sleeping Connaught. He wasn’t “falling,” but it seemed the deck, and the exam bed in front of him were reaching up: beckoning him, seducing him into falling.

And then he could see Amar, bravely strung-up between two posts, before a blazing bonfire, facing down the crowd on Mikhos IV. And before that, forming a chain of brothers, from one ship to another. He was the distillation of James T. Kirk, and an honor far greater than any he could imagine for himself.

McCoy did not reach out to steady him further. A man must walk through rough waters alone.


	18. Chapter 18

“And so it may be possible to ‘refract’ what we sometimes call the warp carrier wave,” Lt. Sulu was saying, a few minutes after Kirk sat down again in his seat on the bridge. 

But all he could think of were those last lines from a play by the bleakest playwright, Samuel Beckett, from long ago: “You must go on… I can't go on… I'll go on…” He was being sucked forward, purely by a sense of duty. The moment was infinitely long.

The navigator had several schematic renderings of the standard warp induction model up on the viewscreen: infinite gravity, generated at one end, the destination; and the ship at the other, being sucked toward it, “faster than light.” She seemed even smarter than her own father, Kirk thought, and how proud Hikaru Sulu must be of her. And how mercurial ‘pride’ seemed in this moment: pride for a great child, pride for some unknown thing in yourself, you had mysteriously passed along. I will bequest to you a fearsome streak of genius, and it will destroy you, or lift you up, and you have no say in the matter at all, which one it will be. You will simply be set down at the busy intersection of your own many strands of recombinant DNA, all woven together like the space-lanes of Rigel. And there you will be left to fend for yourself.

“And by passing these standard formulations in, essentially, an intermittent but parallel fashion,” she sighed, coming to the completion of her proposed remedy, “the continued damage to the fabric of space and time is effectively spread out over a much greater time frame.”

“We live to fight another day,” Kirk nodded, speaking not only to her, but to himself as well.

“Yes sir. In theory.”

Setting aside the possible solution to a galaxy-wide problem; the miracle, at the moment seemed to be that Lt. Sulu had not required any of Kirk’s own fatherly encouragement. And that became a whole new avenue of self-torture. Living so long in the chain of command was now a poor imitation of family management. Till now, captaincy had been “parenthood à la carte.” Up till the last week or so.

The navigator took her seat at the helm again, and the planet below, Vaccarra, 892-IV, a vicious joke version of Earth, returned: rotating beneath the stars.

“Signal from the planet, Captain,” Commander Uhura said, behind him: waking him, as though everything else had been a dream.

“On screen.”

“Aye, sir.”

A new face greeted him, and the Enterprise computer quickly supplied biographical data on the right-hand side. 

“Greetings, Captain Kirk,” the man, identified as a Mr. Muracey blinked, otherwise barely moving, in an office at a desk. He sat beneath a window full of pleasant blue sky, and those two moons far overhead. His gray, curly hair stood out from his temples.

“Yes sir, what can I do for you today,” Kirk answered, sounding tired, and not quite himself, but like an old-time clerk in a general store. Which sounded preferable, at the moment.

“We need the body back, that you took away.”

James T. Kirk had not expected such a personal request. But his own long years of command and sacrifice kept him from any overt sign of disturbance. The new first citizen could not possibly have known of the link between Kirk and Amar.

“For what purpose, sir?”

“To avoid a social collapse.”

Now that was a good answer, Kirk thought to himself. But what was he supposed to do, let them destroy the evidence of an out-of-control band of riot police? What was Muracey expecting of his own race, if their slow-moving rebellion had suddenly caught fire? It sounded more like Muracey intended to bury the body as deeply as he could, before any questions could be raised.

“I’m afraid that’s impossible,” Kirk said, relishing his own bureaucracy, for once.

“Captain, there is a very popular legend on this world, that a savior will die and rise again, from the dead. Now that the body is missing, people are beginning to talk. Return the body at once, and let us be done with the matter.”

A string of curse words ran through Kirk’s mind, which he dared not say aloud.

“And where is Absalom?” the captain of the USS Enterprise inquired, at last. Mr. Muracey seemed to gulp, visibly. It was as if he were a baby chick, stumbling naked out of a hard shell of his own reserve.

“We had presumed it was his body, taken away by you, with the others.”

“He is not on board this ship, and his is not among the bodies we collected,” Kirk said, strangely comfortable in a dark, enigmatic mood. 

Mr. Muracey raised his hands to the sides of his head, as if he might tear his stiff temple hair out, and then stopped in mid-gesture. Slowly, his half-clenched fingers lowered again, to the desktop. Something much larger had taken charge of reality on 892-IV, and was running away with events.

“We would greatly appreciate any help you could offer, in the quick apprehension of the son of Merikus.”

“Of course,” Kirk nodded. Most likely Mr. Muracey had had nothing at all to do with the murder of Amar, and the mad shooting before and after that. The biographical data on the screen said nothing about a background in police or security or intelligence, to suggest he had any role in the violence.

“Thank you,” Muracey sighed, hopelessly.

“And, I should tell you, First Citizen,” Kirk added, with only the faintest trace of enjoyment, “Absalom is not the son of Merikus. He is my son.”

Muracey’s eyes widened, at the apparent fulfillment of prophecy. 

“And now he is to rise again,” the First Citizen stared down, awestruck— not at Kirk, and not at some camera in that office on the planet, but at something, at himself, at his entire reasoning and knowledge of the Universe, falling apart. Events had outstripped his own planning. And some anguished fiction, told to comfort the suffering for centuries, was springing up to sweep an entire civilization aside. He calmed himself, and spoke again.

“I am so sorry for your loss. But may I implore you, Captain, not to tell anyone of this?”

“We have a strict policy of… non-interference,” Kirk said, wishing it were truer. None of this was Kirk’s fault, and yet of course all of it was. But ‘prophecy’ to him was just a word to tie together a string of horrible mistakes. Which, in turn, would be the end of everything this world considered normal. It often seemed that men were born with bits of prophecy in each of them, to hook together and bring them down in clutches.

On the other hand, Kirk had certainly not agreed to be kidnapped by the Gideons, nor given a last sexual fantasy before death, by the Vaccarrians. If everyone would just stop looking to their own personal conception of the heavens for five minutes, to solve all their problems, he could have a normal life. Whatever that was. Descending from the heavens, to offer men a place in the stars. Who could mistake that for a godlike pretense?

But how could he not have gone back to visit his old loves, and any offspring he had had? How could they not have somehow found each other, when it was his assigned task to bring together a federation of planets? What was he supposed to do, resign from the hell of men's prophecies?

“May I ask,” the First Citizen said, “if you know of Absalom’s whereabouts?”

“We had thought he was with you.” The whole thing was as bleak as any human comedy could be, and the top of Muracey’s head seemed bone-white, beneath his hair.

After they said their goodbyes, the image of the planet returned before him, and Kirk turned to Mr. Spock by his right side.

“Should I ‘present the body’?” Kirk asked, implicitly invoking the ancient Earth term, habeas corpus. “It’s not even the body they were hoping for. Does that make things better or worse?” 

“As a legal matter, if you trust their jurisprudential system, perhaps you should. After you have held some form of memorial for yourself, of course.” For even the Vulcan knew his heart, better than he knew it himself. 

“If I trust them,” Kirk blinked, looking forward again. Spock seemed to rock back on his heels, in a kind of repose, as if Kirk had already made the decision not to. But what else could they do with the body anyway— which Muracey had presumed was Absalom’s. Finding it was not, had made things worse. And what even qualified as interference any more? 

The captain shifted uncomfortably, and leaned closer to the science officer.

“And your analysis of Lt. Sulu’s plan?” But he was already thinking of Amar’s body, to be laid out in the ship’s non-denominational chapel, where perhaps he could figure everything out in a moment of silence. But Spock was answering the question about the warp refractions.

“Scientifically sound,” his old friend shrugged. “It does not… fall apart in simulations.”

“Then neither should we,” Kirk gave a sigh of relief. Soon he’d have to deliver Amar’s shredded Gideonite body down to Vaccarra, to prevent one from having died in place of the other. One died a substitutional death, and the other now threatened to rise as the savior.

The orderlies from sickbay laid out Amar’s body in a fresh Starfleet uniform, without braid or insignia. He was set on a bier at the front of the chapel, and soft music was playing. Half the boy’s face and head was covered with a padded bandage, made from a small Federation flag. As each of Jim Kirk’s longtime friends came in, he stood and shook their hands, or embraced. 

But he was beginning to wonder if there was something ephemeral about life, very specific to his offspring. First David, now Amar, and (the way things were going) Absalom would be next. Sickbay was filled with his sons who’d had their own brush with mortality just hours before. 

As the chapel filled up, people were skirting between the body and the front row, and the cloth that was covering the gurney fluttered as they passed. The Federation emblem covering half of Amar’s head seemed to glow in the gentle light. Soft music played from unseen speakers. All this fuss for a dead young man. 

The department heads were seated around Kirk, in the front row. Uhura cried, Haines seemed to lean down a bit, to implore the young man to spring back to life. But there is an uneasy tension between the living and the dead: it is not you on that table, death is not for you, and you are somehow pushed away from it. But once again it is a part of you, a dead limb no surgeon can remove. 

Did it matter that the chapel was so simple, and stripped of any particular god or gods? The whole ship sailed through the cathedral of a universe. Being in this interior room, devoid of windows, one was forced to look within for a different kind of grace and glory, to impose some a sense of peace upon the darkest corners of the mind. 

Finally the Gideonite brothers were ushered in, the ones who’d been certified to leave the medical station, some in wheelchairs. And the entire texture of the moment began to change as their number grew. One by one the young men's faces went into a kind of shock, as they looked down at the face of their oldest brother. It went very slowly, one by one. 

And then one of them began singing a deep sad song from behind Kirk, like a tormented Irish madrigal. The benches were filling up with Amar’s fraternal twins, born in a sort of continuous cycle, in twos and threes and fours, from one single bonding of the captain and the beautiful Odona. As much as Gideon itself, she’d been the earth to all of them, bearing a harvest of sons he might never have known. He was glad he came back, even at this price, though his whole body seemed to dissolve in the moment, to spread to a fog. Humming along quietly to the tune of his sons, he imagined his own lyrics: and I am now the darkest sky; and I, the darkest sky.

It was getting crowded, and one of the young men squeezed in between Kirk and Uhura, and began to cry a hopeless cry. She took his hand, and a gasp or wail escaped his lips, before he could gradually quiet himself. The singing had a heartbeat kind of rhythm to it, and some of the boys ducked their heads at regular intervals, returning to an indecipherable refrain in a folk song from an archaic language of their own world. Amar was not going to stand up after all of this, though the song go on to kingdom come, and yet they sang as if he would. When Jim Kirk stood up and went to stand over the body, to face them all, there was a silence. He began very matter-of-factly, but grew emphatic, and then quiet and perhaps even too personal at the end.

“On Earth, a long time ago, when you didn’t know where else to go, you simply… went to America. And when a brash young man ordered that nation into space, and was slain so young, other brash young men and women stepped forward to take his place. They didn’t know where else to go, either. And I… have been that man: stepping forward from one past generation to this, from when I was young. And now you will step forward, from the death of Amar, for you must take his place.”

“We are always passing on the power of life. We are filled with hope and despair, as life goes out of us, to light some other darkness. Just as your mother sent life… into space… the memory of Amar must guide you as you go your way, from here. Everything you loved about him is in you, as well as me. Everything you honor about his memory becomes the strength that will deliver… life… into your hands. And that life, you lift up to the dark.”

His tone became more emphatic.

“Soon, and very soon, every darkness will turn to light. The force of the joy, and the fierce determination of his life, carries on in you. You lift him up, to the brilliance yet to come. It’s what we carry with us, every day, not knowing when or where we’ll set it down. But we pick up Amar’s life today, because he… lights our way.”

And he went back to sit, in case anyone else wished to speak. But they all began to sing again. Uhura had picked up the steady melodic pattern, of course, and hummed along, tears streaking down her face. But after about ten minutes, and the sheer intensity of it, he knew he had to get back to the business ahead. The long curving corridor outside the chapel seemed very clean and cool and quiet, after all that.

Every mournful story is that way. When the wrong person dies, you have to find a way to make him, or her, the right person. Perhaps the wicked proconsul, of the Old Order, should have lived, and Merik should have died, as everyone assumed, all those years ago. Just as Jim Kirk’s eulogy for Amar had assumed that life must go on, life would gone on, on Vaccarra. Maybe it would go on in maddened Absalom. Maybe that’s how it was meant to be.

In some horrible way, he would either make the wrong person the right person, down there; or the other way around. Somehow, he would have to come out of this, knowing that in ten thousand years, someone else could look back and understand how it all seemed “right” at the moment. 

But there was no right person, and no wrong person. It had all sprung from him, from his racing this way and that, and people reaching out to him for the hope or fate or power they thought they saw in him.

He stepped onto the bridge. Mr. Spock stood a little more graciously than usual, in deference to the ritual just ended. No particular eye contact was needed, though Spock could see right away that the captain was lost in thought, as he took the center seat with a soundless sigh.

But the Vulcan stood by his side. Somehow it was just good manners. Kirk sat there for a long time. Once the Gideonites had returned to the shuttle bay, with the shielding repaired, and all the ceiling projections of their home world overhead, and all the beds laid out again, he would take Amar down to 892-IV for a ceremony, and some kind of witnessing.

It was creepy. He beamed down, with Amar sealed up in a Federation body bag, blue with gold leaves, encompassing stars, and more stars that emerged in the fabric, in an animation, a graphic display of history, of glory, of success, of order: like an armful of gold medals being pinned on a dead man’s chest, over and over, for heroic service. The gradual emergence of glowing new Federation systems on the fabric, between the laurel leaves, seemed to suggest that no life was lost in vain. 

Before he and the remains dematerialized in the transporter room, the emergence of star clusters inside the gold leaves seemed harmless, simple, peaceful, natural. But, under the cloudy sky on Vaccarra, those same stars seemed pale and struggling, as the pattern reasserted itself, under gray and diffuse light. He had foolishly chosen the hardest cases, the most resistant planets, on what seemed to be his final trek.

It was the kind of square where firing squads marched up to stare you down, before the inevitable shots were fired. The whole interior plaza was walled in on four sides by a sprawling, two-hundred year-old office building, windows draped shut by some official order, all blindly overlooking an expanse of perfectly arranged reddish-gray granite bricks in the courtyard, without greenery or decoration. Arched passageways, colonnades, led to quiet streets beyond, shaded by trees on one side. A very respectful honor guard stepped forward, and Kirk glanced up at temporary scaffolding that supported camera crews overhead, to make sure there was a clear video record of the whole wretched thing. He thought he saw Mr. Muracey among the dignitaries, his gray and curling hair twisting sideways from under a military cap, begging to be torn out by his own horrified fingers. But they all bunched together in long dark coats, and military-looking peaked caps, like fearful pigeons, perhaps to disguise their numbers.

A man he did not recognize stepped even closer, and bowed to Kirk. He had a face like a store-bought ham, and hands that were thick and flat and made no extraneous moves. With a brusqueness that startled the starship captain, this stranger unzipped the body bag on its floating gurney with a sharp sweep of a clenched right finger and thumb. Kirk was secretly relieved they’d put Amar in a Starfleet uniform, just to help make everything very clear indeed. Good job, he told his truest son, or what was left of him.

There was a very strange pause, and the Vaccarrian mumbled some words of apology. Then he gently lifted the bandage covering Amar’s left cheek, and also from the dome of his skull. Kirk’s stomach was full of hawks’ talons, and he began to feel he was back at the Academy, whirling around in a g-force simulator. But he kept his eyes on the official on the other side of the gurney, waiting till he was satisfied, and that the cameras had seen and recorded the whole thing. And that this was definitely not Absalom, definitely not waiting to rise from the dead.

Then there was brusque, inappropriate talking up above. The whole thing was inappropriate, but now the ceremony in the vast courtyard, as big as a city block, was interrupted by another piercing reality. A few of the cameramen were speaking in disrespectful tones overhead. The fellow with the large head and flat hands, on the other side of the body, seemed to be caught in the actor’s nightmare: waking up in a play, before an entire audience, after he had somehow managed to miss every single rehearsal. The whole thing had transpired before the present dignitaries. But the shot had been lost, and the television people were angry.

Ground crew, in ill-fitting dark jackets, stepped forward from behind the scaffolds, and looked around in surprise. More and more of the TV people were talking at once, and the decorum of the government’s solemn proving moment was shattered by the increasingly loud protests of the members of the mass media. It felt like one of those points in history where an assassin would simply pull a gun and start shooting people, as there were too many variables, and no clear controls.

A couple of TV vans drove in closer, rumbling across the granite pavers. The scene resembled a film shoot, or something very much the opposite of a mournful, diplomatic exercise. Everyone slumped, before another take was set up.

And in that moment, though he didn’t know why, Jim Kirk reached out to grab, to embrace, Amar’s body: as if it were becoming ephemeral before him. And it was gone. It had literally vanished, along with the floating gurney.


	19. Chapter 19

“If, indeed, Sona is in custody of the body,” Spock was saying up on board the Enterprise, “our course of action is somewhat limited.” Kirk stood in a corner of the large enclosed government square, listening through his communicator. 

Before beam-down, they had taken the precaution of placing a tracer dot amongst Amar’s remains. And since by now they hadn’t seen Sona in whole a day, she also seemed a likely participant in the horrible shootings. Based on Connaught’s strange story, in the aftermath: the helmets of the police switched onto the Gideonites’ heads; the handcuffs as quickly binding people together. And, first Amar was here, and then he was there, that horrible day.

“She moves too fast,” Kirk nodded, holding his communicator under his chin, as the TV crews got into their vans looking disgruntled, and drove away empty-handed. 

“And why did you change his clothes,” Mr. Muracey half-shouted, pacing behind Kirk in the near-empty square. It seemed a small issue, the honorary Starfleet uniform on the body, moments ago. Except on Vaccarra, a planet of intrigue, where Amar’s death had inevitably become the greatest conspiracy of them all. 

Either way he would have lost a son, Kirk realized. It wasn’t going to feel any better if it had been Absalom. Based on what little he’d known about the boy before he had suddenly turned a world on its head. Now, in retrospect, maybe it’d have been much better if it had been Absalom, instead of Amar. If there was anything good about a heroic death, beyond the inspirational value.

“Ask if those two security guards will volunteer to speed up again, to find her,” Kirk sighed. He had a strange idea that if he did it himself, he’d slow down again and find himself 100 years older, like Deela. 

“Affirmative,” the first officer’s voice replied. “However, location tracing will lag behind the Scalosian’s natural rate of activity. By the time the guards beam down and accelerate to match Sona, she will have moved again. And till then the guards will be forced to use expired data.”

“And why did you give up the body, under such risky circumstances?” he could hear the other admirals asking, during some official inquiry, weeks or months from now.

“It was a calculated risk,” Kirk assumed he would say, for such calculations were often hazy before the switch was thrown. “I had no desire, or ambition, to have dominion over any world, and certainly not a world like that!” 

He wouldn’t say that in an inquiry, but that’s the way he felt, trying to think of where Absalom would be hiding. Imagining that perhaps he rode around on Sona’s shoulders, while she pushed Amar’s body around the city streets. 

Mr. Muracey was pacing in little back-and-forth’s, halfway across the open square, when Kirk closed his communicator and walked toward him. After seeming to acknowledge the captain’s approach, the planetary official would scarcely look at him. Three lesser dignitaries stood with him, looking grim.

“Are there any big religious celebrations coming up, or major public… functions?” Kirk asked. Muracey seemed intensely displeased at having to converse with him any further. But both men were trying to imagine some perfect staging for a resurrection.

“What am I supposed to do, shut down the revels?” the Vaccarrian spat.

“Absolutely not. It may be the only way to catch him.”

“You keep giving him leverage in this situation,” Muracey said, now turning on Kirk at last. “And your solution, every time things have gone completely wrong, is simply to give him more leverage!”

“We have an old saying on my planet,” Kirk shrugged, apologetically: “give a man enough rope, and he’ll hang himself.”

“Yes, well, we have an old saying on this planet, and that’s ‘mind your own business!’” 

Plainly anguished, and giving up hope of a quick solution, Muracey led his group off the square, with clicking boot heels, down through the arches and shadows, and out to the street. Kirk stood alone in the square plaza, lined with its covered windows and crooked little chimneys on top of that. The scaffolds for the cameras looked like they should have had bodies hanging from them.

He wished Sona was still there, buzzing around invisibly. But if he had been her, he would already be…

He handed a taxi driver several vicci notes, and got out over the rail yards, on the south side of town. Traffic howled in the distance, and great, idle train engines sat on the wide expanse of tracks, a few blocks away, like starships standing still: like all that weight and mass, in their own invisible space-lanes, going nowhere. He climbed down a flight of stone stairs, below the six-lane street, not really expecting to find any trace of Absalom. Or, at least, not Absalom himself.

“It doesn’t matter if he’s a god or not,” Taleel was insisting, as Sona sat staring at the body bag. They were speaking of Absalom, of course, but the Scalosian girl seemed far from the discussion at hand. Taleel had waited for her, in a hotel penthouse, far above the planet’s capitol. And with the body, Sona brought up a large platter of food from a refrigerator in the hotel kitchen. Neither young woman even looked at it, or the sparkling wine she’d found.

“Then why did Amar have to die,” Sona objected. She had left Absalom sleeping in a house for sale a couple of miles away.

“Because the best impulses of our world have been subverted by the people who profit from our worst impulses,” Taleel pleaded.

“But nobody’s going to trust Absalom to run a planet.”

“Nobody else is addressing the problems. So why not?”

There was a long pause.

“It wasn’t his fight,” Sona said, changing the subject and looking past Amar’s body bag, as if his own spirit hung above it; and then out across the hazy city below. She had watched the day before, in extremely slow motion, as a flicker of calculation in Absalom’s own fears colored what happened next, under the lip of the big memorial fountain.

“But because of him,” Taleel insisted, “and maybe because of me, and maybe because of you, it’s a fight he can win.”

“But what do you want,” Sona said, turning to face Taleel, in her impatience. The Vaccarrian looked back in confusion. After an embarrassed laugh, she spoke.

“I want to go back to… when everyone was considered the same. It was a long time ago, centuries ago. Wars and wars ago. You were considered to be just the same, except for circumstance, or happenstance, as anybody else. Somehow that went…”

“Oh stop it! Of all the dozens of little Kirks running around, you’ve got to be the Kirk-iest. And you’re not even related to the man! You. Tell me what you want. Not what you want for your planet. Tell me what you want for you. It’s like you’re all hiding yourselves behind some valorous scorn for the fact of being alive.” 

Sona listened to her own words, her resounding impatience, and then became still, hoping she hadn’t frightened the other girl too badly. The blue gas rose thicker around her face, which had grown warm from impatience, and the urge to move things forward. But Taleel ducked her head, apologetically, and gulped, and wound up on her big padded hotel chair, sitting taller by little gradual steps.

“No one’s ever asked me that before, ‘what do you want.’ Sorry.” There was a natural sort of intimacy about her, an introspective quality, that perhaps had been long trampled on.

It made Sona feel guilty, considering her own natural independence; and the way the highly advanced computers on Scalos were programmed to cater to her every whim. Her throat twisted in sadness, as Taleel began to speak. 

“I always thought I was the lucky one. My father was a doctor, and I went on to university. Now it’s a miracle if anyone can afford it. They can’t really, it’s the new slavery. Ah-chef!” she said, like a sneeze, as a kind of exclamation, at the impossibility of becoming an adult. 

“I want to be happy. I want everyone to recognize the genius in each other. I want them to recognize the genius in me, I suppose. I want people to stop being ashamed they’re not like the heroes in stories or the legends of old. But if those are just lies, I want to believe in the lies that normal people tell themselves, about their own futures. I can’t know the legend you’re actually becoming, if I don’t believe in the lie you’ve set down in the first place. It’s always make-believe, at first. I’m going to believe your lie until you make it the truth. If you want to believe you’re the queen of some… ruined planet, with magical powers… then I really want to believe it too!”

At that, Sona simmered. For she was these things. The blue gas grew thick again, to combat her speeding up. But apart from the sudden shifts she could make in reality, from one location to another, for Taleel or Absalom, or Amar and Connaught; and apart from her own astonishing reappearance in unexpected places (which she admitted might have seemed the tiniest bit rude to everyone else) it didn’t seem to matter any more. 

She had learned so much in the last months aboard the Enterprise, about other people. From watching them all, scratching their way from moment to moment without exploding in flames at the pointlessness of living through every single individual instant, she found she had a secret admiration for every one of them, as she sipped from their coffee or drinks. And now, on Vaccarra, these two women sat on opposite ends of reality: one reaching out from the fantastic toward the truth; the other, the other way around. 

And then there was a loud crash! The two jumped up, for the pair of young female security guards from the Enterprise had kicked open the hotel suite doors, and come running in, pointing phasers at them both. Sona reached for her freezer unit. But just as fast, one of the guards fired, and filled the room with a great green blast. 

They had spent too long mourning the young man in that Starfleet body bag; and Rogers and Eskandar had tracked them down. The body was sent up into orbit again, for safe-keeping, till all things could be played out.

“Well maybe you should just ask him if he needs your help,” McCoy was saying, trying to cut through a sense of inaction, as he stood by Spock at the center of the bridge.

“Please, try to remember: you are a doctor, and not a starship captain,” the first officer said. Somehow, McCoy felt he may have been bested by that, though he was already puzzling over something else.

“So we’re just supposed to wait, all the way through some alien version of Thanksgiving and Christmas, for this kid to reappear and declare himself to be the god of their world?”

“Again, I am constrained to point out, Earth analogies about the rituals and economics of other civilizations are both inherently false and dangerous.”

“Commander Uhura,” McCoy said, turning to an impartial arbiter, over his right shoulder, “perhaps you could tell us all what happens when two parties cannot agree on the simple truth of the matter before them.”

“One, or both,” the beautiful communications chief laughed quietly, “always goes a step too far. And, usually, a few more after that.” It was the least funny thing she’d ever said, and yet a puff of air escaped her lips. 

“See? I’m right,” McCoy nodded, with just the right amount of conviction.

“As right, as right can be,” Spock said, tilting his head and quoting from The Mikado. The doctor had spent the better part of the previous day prying bullets out of young men, and the first officer was inclined to let him vent.

“When the Constellation was destroyed by that doomsday machine,” McCoy was saying, rummaging around in his memory, for the comfort of having survived, “we were all running away from that huge, long weapon. And when... the Earth was attacked for lack of whales, it was being destroyed by that huge, long weapon… And now we’re all just running away from Jim Kirk’s huge, long… history of romantic adventures.”

“I hardly think this is the time for recrimination, over the follies of youth,” the Vulcan said, as plain as ever. 

“I know. I’m just saying it’d be much simpler,” McCoy persisted, “if it was some even bigger, scarier device from even farther out, in the farthest reaches of space. And not some inescapable little… character flaw we just happened to have brought with us.” He folded his arms in a show of dismay.

“And yet, how often have we learned the most troublesome of all the great devices,” Spock sighed, taking a computer tablet from a yeoman and signing off on a report, “are simply those contrived within the minds of men.”

At a busy hotel, James T. Kirk found a brochure in a kiosk that told him about the revels, which were clearly just beginning. The photographs promised parades of beautiful show girls, marching bands, and fireworks beneath the twin full moons, and all the usual touristy events. In spite of it, he had a glum feeling it would magically turn into a Christ-like resurrection, along with a cash bar.

Even if Chekhov hadn’t blazed that face in the sky, a few nights ago, cuing the public, and even if Merik’s body hadn’t been found in that airlift copter, alerting the government, and even if the world hadn’t assumed that Absalom had tragically been killed in a riot across town, there would already be the edginess of tens of thousands— or hundreds of thousands— of people roaring together in the dark, every night for a week. Everything was in place for chaos and upheaval. The stars were aligned for it, even with only half the facts.

The lobby was as crowded as a Rigelian spaceport, with tourists checking in for their own version of “festival,” or a worldwide Mardi Gras. Gondolas stacked with bags and trunks were shoved toward brass-doored elevators, which swallowed them up with the bellhops, groaning under the weight of suitcases, swaying out of sight like galleons stuffed with treasure. 

He went outside, on a beautiful day, and walked toward the park grounds. Flatbed trucks were being unloaded, and assembled into tents and tables, which were fitted with canisters of compressed gas, and tanks of water, and all the elements of a city-wide cookout. He wanted to warn them, the workmen, some on forklifts, hoisting the gigantic crates of sodas and waters and beers, and the other men amidst the burbling engines of generators, or busy stringing colored lights from pole to pole overhead, and even the birds that went zinging over all that, as they constructed it all. 

The most prominent outdoor structure, other than the tall buildings, was a large Ferris wheel, sitting in the morning sun along the waterfront. He made his way over there, to see that another stage had also been built on the seaside, where luxury yachts floated out in the quiet waves beyond that, and silent tankers far out in the mist along the horizon. Closer in than all of that, rows of smaller private boats bobbed along the docks. The great wheel seemed to creak above it all, as the warmth of day expanded its metal girders bit by bit. 

Part of him kept scanning the vacation crowds, and the hurrying business-people, as he looked for faces from twenty years ago: escaped slaves who slaved up in the buildings now, or forgotten gladiators who’d gone through some invisible social transporter beam, and been reassembled as traffic cops, or cab drivers. All were gone, disappeared into the ranks of the past or the present, their faces plastered over, if they’d survived, with new work and worries. Cities change, even the faces of worlds, but nothing so fast as the face of survivors.

Of course he was relying on his own genetics to tell him this would be the spot, tomorrow night, or three nights from now, or four, that Absalom would make his reappearance and electrify the planet. There would have to be a focusing event, some kind of moment to set the stage… And now that a security team had isolated Sona and Taleel, Absalom would have to do it all himself. 

He was somewhere nearby, though they hadn’t figured out where. And neither young woman had been willing to tell. Surely they weren’t still on Absalom’s side, James T. Kirk told himself, as he stood below the wheel, testing the wind.

His friends were very surprised to see him, when they got out of jail that morning. They glumly stumbled out into the bright sunshine at the steps of the jail, as usual, wandering back toward the downtown. And he simply intercepted them as soon as it seemed safe, a few blocks away. In their warm embraces, each head glowed like an ember in the early light. Everything was falling nicely into place.

“Well, it was just like they say,” he shrugged, as if the whole thing had not come after a night of calculation. “I went through this tunnel of light, and this… voice… told me it wasn’t my time. And I woke up! In an alley, between the trash bins,” he added, in a sort of ghastly wonderment, provoking wondering laughs at his rise to, and subsequent fall from, grace.

“But we saw,” the friends insisted, some of them touching his own scalp, grimacing at the memory of Amar’s violent death, on TV’s around the world. 

“I suppose I just have some greater purpose in this life, yet to be fulfilled,” Absalom said, looking down, and troubled, looking on the street for some immortal calling that might have dropped through a hole in his pocket. So much had been denied to him, to his heart, growing up, that great personal confabulations came easily to him now. So much more had been taken away, that he eagerly filled in the gaps.

“What are you going to do,” they asked. There were about ten of them, or twelve. 

“Tonight, I’m going to the revels!” he roared, as if it were perfectly obvious. His friends laughed. “But you have to spread the word. We will make some kind of announcement, or statement tonight, about the future of all of us.” He turned to go, leaving them dumbfounded.

“Go! Tell everyone!” He urged, comically, when he turned back to look at them all, still staring.

“Where will you go,” one of the friends insisted quietly, fearful for Absalom’s newly restored life.

“I’ll go… swimming!” he said brightly, for it was the obvious thing to do after a resurrection.

“Message from Starfleet, Mr. Spock,” Lt. Diarab’eh intoned, over the Vulcan’s shoulder, on the bridge of the Enterprise. The crustaceanoid’s hair-like fingers lifted from the instrument panel, as she turned toward the first officer.

“On screen, please.”

After the blue screen with the stars and laurel leaves faded, the bridge crew turned to see a grizzled older man, with a particularly ornate insignia over his heart, giving a prerecorded statement, looking as grim as any admiral that age, after all the wear and tear.

“This is Admiral Lancaster, at Starbase 93. We regret to inform you of the loss of the science vessel Marie Curie, in a warp-shift experiment off the Circinus X-1 binary system. In trying to come up with a solution to our current theoretical dilemma, over predicted stress-fractures in the subspace lanes of warp travel, they sacrificed their 576 lives in valiant service to the Federation of Planets, and to the quest for knowledge. The Marie Curie was the largest of the Federation’s pure-science vessels, in service for over fifteen standard calendar years.

“After consultation with Earth, we are planning to extend the lockdown on interstellar warp travel indefinitely. Expect a redirect to the appropriate command subsystems under Command Menu ‘R’ as in Regulus. Lancaster out.”

The admiral disappeared from the screen after a short, respectful silence. And then the soundless, faintly mocking laurel leaves were shown again briefly, still holding all those stars together. What more could be said, after the one millionth space tragedy? Was every cat doomed to lose some eternal war with its own curiosity? Did every explorer merely exist in an untenable “living-and-dead” reality? Just waiting till some irreconcilable problem ripped opened their cat box, to show the real impossibility of existence? 

It had been a nice clear transmission, for coming from the other side of Federation space, with hardly any static or picture noise. Still, if there was ever an old man more displeased to make such an announcement, Spock hadn’t seen him in decades. The Vulcan puzzled over Lancaster’s wording, though, “theoretical dilemma,” and “predicted stress-fractures,” as if it was something to be handed down to a future generation to worry over. 

Soundlessly, the chief engineer of the Enterprise had come up on Spock’s left, during the transmission.

“Well,” Scotty sighed, gamely, “if ye’re still game to give it a try, Lt. Sulu’s equations, I can have it all on standby in ten hours. And by ten hours, I mean five.”

Spock tried to imagine a way to access the Curie’s warp-shift theories and implementation, that led to her disaster. The fact that each person on board the Enterprise seemed to have a different idea, about the workability of any warp-shift solution, only made things worse. 

“Lieutenant Diarab’eh,” Spock said, turning a fraction over his right shoulder. “Contact Starbase 93 and request all data pertaining to the Curie’s warp experimentation, as soon as possible. Lt. Sulu, prepare to reconcile new data with our own planning.”

“Yes, Mr. Spock.”

Scotty nodded, without smiling. “Well. That’ll give me another… twelve hours, at least.” Till the shut-down came, if it came at all. “Assuming Starfleet doesn’t hear of another warp-drive disaster, that cuts everything off in six.” 

You could almost hear the crackle of impatience, disrupting the calm of all Federation space: as every ship’s captain through each of these arms of the Milky Way weighed their own decisions, and the fate of their crews alike. 

The young man floated in the pool, and the old man observed quizzically, now and then. Absalom had swum furiously for the first ten minutes, and then just paddled around, while the retired senator read a newspaper at a table and chair. Just uphill from them was a large brick mansion, on a hill overlooking the capital city in the distance. It was nearly noon.

“You won’t get two chances,” the senator said at last, folding the paper as the son of Merikus sloshed up and out of the water and grabbed a towel. 

“Nor will they,” Absalom grinned, drying off.

“You’re gambling the same thing won’t happen all over again,” the older man chid angrily, straightening the newspaper on the table.

“A second coming would be redundant,” the younger man smiled, a bit loftily, searching the horizon, adopting a visionary attitude. He plopped down in the nearest chair, but soon huddled under the large towel, covering his head too: showing he was at least one single subatomic particle more respectful of any more helicopters that might possibly come flying overhead, above the privacy hedges. On came the sunglasses, just to be sure.

“Well,” the senator sighed, “if it were me, I’d just go off to work with some native tribes for ten years, ten thousand miles away, and rub off the stink of empire, so people could forget.”

“And then be old,” Absalom sneered deliciously, winking that it was much to be desired.

“You would be surprised,” the senator said diffidently, before giving up on the idea that he had the slightest chance of shattering the ironclad confidence of youth. The water sloshed quietly in the pool, and a very loud bird squawked occasionally in the far bushes.

“My poor mother,” Absalom sighed, at someone who’d set a bad example of growing old, in a world of vicious men.

“Yes,” the older man said quietly, his round cheeks giving the word a plush sense of finality. He wanted to add (but did not) the old saying that, in spite of every tragedy, ‘the Empire is the mother of us all.’ Nobody talked like that anymore, nobody was afraid of the same old thing. Now there was only the moment, the glimmer of self-creation, and then the explosion of self-awareness after that, in an entire universe of “me.” In a moment Absalom would have forgotten Drusilla, and be chattering away about himself again. And, indeed, barely a moment had passed.

“I suppose I’m just the chrome-plated ornament on a car that’s fallen apart,” Absalom said. The towel fell off his nearly blond head, though he still wore the dark glasses. 

“Really? I think of you more as a ringmaster in a circus, bringing on a merry little freak show.”

“Hm.”

“But people don’t like that sort of nonsense,” the senator pursed his lips, dismissively. These days, everyone had an arts degree, and went grasping for a grander metaphor.

“They like glittering girls and galloping horses,” Absalom jumped up, waving his arms, the towel becoming a big white cape.

“Well, you’ll have all that tonight, and all week too,” the senator smiled unhappily, thinking of the revels. “And fireworks.”

“Fireworks! Whoosh, whoosh! Then all will be well.” He bent down and kissed the grumpy, grandfatherly figure on the forehead for luck.

“Look,” the old man shivered in his terry-cloth robe. “I hope you’re not planning on doing anything terribly foolish in all of this,” as if that hadn’t happened already, in the worst possible way. “Killing you a second time is only good bookkeeping for these people.”

“What d’ya mean?” Absalom smiled, goading him like a drunk in a bar. He had become almost perpetually thrilled to be risen from the dead, or near that, for the cameras that would come that night.

The senator shook all over, looking fussy and impatient. “You can’t… do that, you can’t set yourself forward as the ‘son of God.’ It’s madness and no one will be having it!”

“The son of life? The son of righteousness? The son of peace? You’ll never find that on Vaccarra,” Absalom snorted, with the mildest air of reproof, as if the senator were a little child, and not the other way around. Then he remembered something strange: “Mother once told me I came from the stars.” The memory seemed to come with a painful flash of maternal urgency, from Drusilla’s long-ago self. In those final, in-between years, before she became a hostage to the New Order.

He reached down and grabbed the old man’s fluted glass on the table, and gulped down the last of the fruit juice to cover a nervous swallow. The senator’s fingers danced on the tabletop. He now assumed the person who had died on the fountain actually came from a spaceship, and part of him even supposed that this was some vast, overarching plan those same aliens had hatched, long ago, in an even grander conspiracy than any mere Vaccarrian could even conceive.

Absalom cannonballed into the pool again, creating the inevitable splash. And no matter what happened, the senator had the sensation that a long, sad chapter was finally coming to an end.

“He’s alive, he’s alive, he’s alive,” Absalom’s friends kept saying to more and more friends, as the day wore on, and even the parents began to take note. 

It was bad enough, for the adults, that a gruesome show of force had been necessary just a day or so earlier. It cast a shadow on the brightest week of the year. This silly young man, this disgraced older brother of Revolo, who had gone too far, and been chopped down for starting a riot. How could it not have ended this way? Still, the children would not be told.

“He’s alive, he’s alive, he’s alive,” they were saying, over and over. And the worst possible ending was that it hadn’t ended yet. Some spirit of idealism crept into the equation, and been stamped out, and yet persisted.

“He could be anywhere, I suppose,” Taleel was saying, with a comical grimace. The security team had dragged her and the handcuffed Sona out to the quiet neighborhoods, to the vacant house where he had slept, and found hardly anything. The two young women in their red and black uniforms puzzled over a tricorder and a Vaccarrian telephone, trying to see if it had been used to make a call. Everyone was weary and feeling the pressure of the crowds, streaming into the city, that they’d been weaving through for the last twenty blocks: dodging families and cars and little groups of people who were only about the same age as themselves. It was like swimming upstream, heading out into the tree-lined streets, and the emptying suburbs. Now they stood in the main room of an empty, thirty year-old home, up for sale. Out-of-date curtains hung in the windows, and a tired-looking kitchen floor was just visible behind a swinging door.

“You’re his girlfriend, where would he go?” one of the Enterprise girls, Eskandar, repeated: incredulous that Absalom and Taleel could maintain a romantic relationship with so little accountability.

“Where would he go most likely,” the other security girl, Rogers, said: trying to sound more reasonable.

“His friends. Who are his friends? Take us there,” the first girl prompted, getting up at last, from the hallway steps. Her phaser had become an extension of her hand, and she waved it sideways, expressively, in a commanding form of conversation. Taleel was finding it reckless and a bit desperate. It was like being kidnapped by some extremist young women’s group, where the truth about everyone’s boyfriend must be ruthlessly sought out, and all the power belonged to whoever had the blaster. 

“Look, I’ve probably lost my job because of you,” Taleel explained. Any other day, she’d be getting ready for work now.

“We appreciate that very much,” Rogers nodded, “and would be happy to resettle you on a world of your choosing, when this is all over.”

“This is the world of my choosing.”

“Well, there are better worlds than this,” Eskandar rolled her eyes.

“I tend not to be promiscuous about that sort of thing,” Taleel said, holding her ground.

“Rigel? What about Rigel,” the golden haired ensign offered. “It’s amazing.”

Now the dark-haired ensign looked exasperated, as if she were tired of Rigel being the answer to everyone’s problems.

“You’ve been to his friends’ homes, take us to those places,” she said quietly, getting up, and assuming a powerful posture. Sona, who had been silent with her hands cuffed behind her back, stood as well.

And so they walked across town again, to a large, plain apartment block that smelled of boiled vegetables. All they found was an eviction notice tacked on the door, at the end of a long hallway on the third floor in back. 

“Well, what’s the next one, where he knows people?” the dark haired ensign asked, more thoughtfully, for at least they were conducting an investigation. They walked a few blocks east, before hailing a cab. At the end of a lot of stop and go traffic, and crosswalks full of people hauling children and picnic supplies, they handed the driver a few paper notes and got out.

“Look,” Sona said, as they stood on a corner, “you’ve got your own formulation of Scalosian water, why don’t we all speed up and just find him as quickly as possible?”

The two young women from the Enterprise considered this, eyeing Sona suspiciously. They spoke quietly among themselves. They had tried this in the rescue of the captain on Gideon, and Sona had betrayed them, but was quickly taken down. Finally, in a very cautious series of motions, one ensign trained her phaser on the two prisoners, while the other drew out a vial from her tunic; and then the other found her vial as well. All four stepped behind an arched pillar by a storefront, for privacy.

“On three,” the dark-haired girl nodded, as Sona reached awkwardly around, with her manacled wrists, and held a finger just over her freezer pack. The two young women in their red and black uniforms raised the vials like shot-glasses, under their noses.

“One,” Sona said.

“Two,” everyone seemed to tense-up.

“Three,” and the three alien women in that shaded corner vanished in a blur around Taleel. She found the two vials at her feet, and drank the remains of both. After a moment, Sona and the two ensigns reappeared. They looked bored at her dragging things out this way.

The world was very quiet now, cars sitting in the morning light; families in the crosswalks, frozen in mid-stride. The character of the sunshine seemed delicious, like syrup, and wavered in the leaves overhead. 

“Run!” Sona said to Taleel, jumping backwards through her cuffed wrists, and bringing her hands out in front. They both took off, through the frozen cars.


	20. Chapter 20

Mr. Scott was watching the lights on a primary control panel in the engine room. The telltales themselves were fine. It was the sequence, the glowing little sections like tiles making up the tall, narrow wall of lights, and the way little patterns interacted, just a bit too tentatively. The computer was still trying to quell the common patterns of warp sequencing, in favor of Lt. Sulu’s equations. It seemed to be on the brink of rejecting her solution to the automatic shutdown.

“Yer messin’ with me signature, lassie,” the chief engineer muttered: imagining no other starship engineer would ever be able to recognize the familiar energy flow he had developed for the Enterprise, if it ever did manage to go dashing between systems again. It would be altered from its usual pattern of mathematical perfection, or at least precision, in his own “signature” flow pattern. His eyes stopped and squinted at that particular part of the fluttering lights again.

“Aye, and that’s where we all go up in flames,” he nodded, as three or four little telltales blinked too slowly, amidst the hundred and seventy three other lights up there before him. The news of the fate of the Marie Curie had made its way through the ship, and through Starfleet. Every engineer, on every warp-drive vessel, would be trying to figure out how to get home before the order to just stay put.

Of course, there had always been a degree of ‘refraction’ in warp drive— the splatters of rainbow light, fleetingly glimpsed when a ship was stretched to infinity, racing toward infinite mass, had been the most obvious example, as matter and antimatter turned the universe inside-out. In a sense, you were still at your point of origin, and simultaneously at your destination, stretched all the way between— and, paradoxically, not anywhere at all. At least to the naked eye. At least, mathematically. So it was no wonder he drank.

If worse came to worse, from the ground, it would simply be seen as a blinding white light, for thirty or forty seconds, and then God himself kicking the planet in the arse. Hurricanes would spring up, and tidal waves, and tornadoes on land, from the upheaval, if they blew up a starship in orbit, which was certainly not his intent: as if the sky had split open, revealing all the terrible wonders that lay beyond.

“Aye, if ever there was a planet that needed kickin’ in the arse,” Scotty said, for that planet was most likely to be 892-IV.

He became aware that someone was standing behind him. 

“What’s that ye got there, Mr. Spock,” the engineer asked with a sigh, having turned and seen a device like a large, old-fashioned camera, in the hands of the Vulcan. It was something that looked like a convex black lens, with a tricorder type box behind it, and a view screen.

“We have lost contact with the security team. So I devised this ultra-fast scanner, to capture some trace of their accelerated metabolism.” But the Vulcan seemed glum. “The scanner will inevitably fail, as it can only report expired data. The time it takes to slow down the Scalosian effect for our viewing will still allow anyone who partakes of those waters to escape far away.”

“Well, don’t be so down on yourself,” Scotty borrowed the device for a moment, and held it up to his face, to look through it. He turned in a circle, as if scanning for hobgoblins in the engine room. “They’re not down here,” he nodded, satisfied that Mr. Spock had done him a fine service through his barely-appreciated ingenuity. He handed the large boxy camera back, but kept his eye on it, as if it might somehow become the savior of them all. Like so many of Mr. Spock’s other inspirations.

“The new equations are working?” The Vulcan still seemed troubled. It was just conversation, and Vulcans never just ‘make conversation.’ From the science officer’s tone, Mr. Scott assumed that Spock was wishing there’d been some better solution.

“Aye, well, they should. But let’s see if the old girl can learn a new trick.”

“In many ways, the Enterprise is the newest of all Constellation class carriers.”

“In the end, Mr. Spock,” the Scotsman drily lamented, “it all comes down to the law of uncertainty. You can’t know what you can’t know.”

“I would respectfully disagree with that statement.”

“Aye, I know ye would. Ye might even say I was ‘certain’ of it,” he added, turning back to the panel of blinking lights. 

Mr. Spock was still standing behind him. And when Scotty turned again, he saw the ultra-fast scanner was pointed at him— or rather, past him, at the instrument board. Those same three or four lights, not quite sequencing with the rest, had also become compelling to the first officer.

It was charming at first, Mr. Spock and his toy. But gradually Montgomery Scott became impatient with someone standing behind him, monitoring the whole situation (which he was barely figuring out for himself) and viewing it all in slow motion, making Scotty look like the worst of all dullards. There was a word for that feeling, when a Vulcan made you feel stupid, but he couldn’t think of it at the moment. “Vulcanosis” wasn’t quite right. He’d heard it many years ago in school. 

An hour had lapsed since the Starfleet threat of a freeze on warp travel, which brought his own personal, arbitrary deadline of getting the engines back online to four hours away. And he didn’t particularly like having to think in a straight line for more than ninety minutes at a time. 

But then he had an idea to occupy Mr. Spock and, not incidentally, to work out a new scientific experiment to try to solve the problem. 

He didn’t feel “trapped,” though James T. Kirk supposed he should. Soon it would be evening, and he wouldn’t be able to see if anyone crept ashore from the yachts that came and went, in the shifting of the ocean. And the crowds along the shore, and into the parks, were becoming thick. You could disappear in that ocean of people, just as easily as the water.

A singer on a stage five or six blocks away was tiny, in her faint spotlight, trying to engage the crowd. But it was still too bright outside for the drama of a soloist. Night would rob everyone of their faces, and the light stabbing overhead would confer a kind of thrilling singularity upon whoever got up there next, whipping the audience into a happy trance. The spirit of the singer would become the spirit of the crowd. At the moment, she wasn’t quite connecting to her audience, where everyone had a visible face, and therefore an identity. But the music was pulsing, jazzy, insinuating.

There were still gaps here and there, in the sprawling mass, and Kirk supposed it was due to the shootings. Maybe people were not entirely sure they wanted to come out, although tens of thousands did seem to find a grisly sort of courage, or resignation to ritual. Husbands appeared apologetic, or deferential, and wives put on a great show of confidence, leading children through stalls and booths and lines to the bathrooms. Somehow they all accepted the burden of courage: to stand in that spot of horror, where the dashing young Absalom was apparently shot to bits. The son of Merikus, everyone told themselves, had left his own troubled stage, and his spotlight had gone out. There was a sense of needless tragedy in the air.

It maddened Jim Kirk, that this might be the trap that Admiral Komak had really tried to warn him of: the trap of his own human nature, of his own life-force. He could very easily imagine a flotilla of helicopters sweeping overhead all over again, beating against the air, before another assault on an over-excited crowd. He knew, from the hourly check-in, the security team had gone into hyper-acceleration. And that meant Sona would be up to something, and Absalom too.

Both were eager to prove themselves. Neither had been tempered by failure. Well, the young queen of Scalos had witnessed the near destruction of her world, and the death her mother, and most recently of Amar. But was she chastened by it, or provoked? 

And no matter how much Kirk had tried to calm Absalom, the boy grew more wild. The strain of youthful rejection and being robbed of his birthright, and watching Drusilla smothered to near death, had driven him mad, Kirk supposed. 

Just as quickly as that, while the sun was disappearing behind the buildings beyond the stage, there was a terrible “crack!” in the air, and a gasp of shock in the distant crowd. 

There had been familiar green flashes in the off along the edge of the park before this, but he assumed it was the flash of traffic, or trains, catching the last light of day. His mind registered it as phaser fire, but a reasonable observer would not have said so. And it was blocks away, out of direct sight: just a visual concussion of green light, against the tall buildings, now and then. 

As he got closer, he could see a light stanchion had collapsed, and people were slowly shifting away from that corner of the park, near the stage.

Behind him he heard a sound like rapidly cooling beakers and test-tubes, the high keening sound of the transporter beam, as Mr. Spock appeared over his shoulder, if the crowd had turned to look back toward the water. The Vulcan held the boxy camera-like device in his hands, and was looking through it, sweeping it one way, then another. They dove into the crowd, going toward the trouble.

Mr. Spock explained the warp refraction experiments they’d planned, as he followed Kirk along, and how he’d hoped to use that device to track Sona, as well as the security detail. 

Now the sun was going down, and they were noticing more stun-like flashes, and seemed to hear the actual sound of muffled phaser-fire. Park police were shooing people away from the fallen light stand, when there was another shock, a blast of noise, from somewhere, or everywhere. It bounced off the tall buildings, like a burst of electronic thunder. Spock turned toward the ocean first, and both men could see a grand yacht had pulled into view, as if to make port. A set of large signaling horns blasted their intent as some millionaire slowly piloted his sleek folly in toward land.

The light stanchion had just crashed down to the grass, with infinite slowness, and the lights blossomed brighter white and exploded. But the sound of it hadn’t yet reached the veiled dancers waiting to go on stage, behind the great platform and a tall backdrop of glitter and spangles. They were slender, swan-like women, space-brides in long gauzy white draped fabric, with pentagonal caps on their heads, trimmed in silver. There were at least a dozen dancers in the troupe, some frozen in rehearsal poses, others bent down, or flinging upward like white birds, or just laughing like schoolgirls at something another of them had just said. And all four of the hyper-accelerated young women went plowing through in a mad dash.

“You have to stop that,” Sona called back to the Enterprise security women, who trailed in dogged pursuit. Another green “stun” blast had gone dawdling past the dancers, before diffusing against a power generator behind the stage, a considerable time after Sona and Taleel had raced by.

“You’re under arrest!” the taller, blonder guard asserted, between gasps, following along behind the brunette, and both of them still a dozen meters behind. Sona knew, from months aboard the starship, that neither ensign was what you might call a cardio extremist. But neither was Taleel, and the Vaccarrian likewise seemed ready to collapse.

Four big pyramids of sparkling wine, in dark blue bottles with pink foil tops, were being pushed uphill on a paved sidewalk by frozen men in their white livery. And this time Sona made the conscious decision to knock over a few of those platforms entirely. Struggling to catch up, Taleel spun out of the way of the crashing, explosion of carbonation. It gave them another few meters’ distance, and a few more seconds of freedom.

When Kirk and Spock got through another dense crowd, the champagne bottles were still fizzing like mad, amidst the broken glass and pools of alcohol. And one Vaccarrian, in a white serving tunic, was mumbling quietly at the far end of the mess, looking down with a kind of sad concentration. Just mumbling, as if saying a prayer, to guide the way for a troubled spirit.

Before him lay a very old woman, dead, looking tiny inside a Starfleet uniform. She was being washed in a river of champagne, as if she’d fallen mid-stride, hurrying before the reach of death itself. It was almost unheard of to see anyone so fragile and ancient in the familiar red and black. Her hair was ghostly white, and her cheeks and eyes and mouth sunk into wrinkles great and small. 

“Cellular degeneration,” Spock said quietly, through clenched teeth. He clicked at his hyper-speed camera/tricorder, till he could pull up the signal from identifying tags on her uniform: one of the security women, Rogers, posed as if she were caught sprawling, many years from now, or flying, across a sparkling black and green nebula in space. As the Vulcan turned and raised the hyper-camera to the backstage area up ahead, Kirk knelt down to urge the ensign on toward the future perfect. Space brides gathered behind him, in silence.

When he stood up, he held a piece of jagged glass from one of the bottles. Spock seemed dismayed at not finding any sign of Sona or Taleel or Eskandar, and turned back toward the body. He tapped on the tricorder’s screen, and as the two men tried to hide Rogers from view, she disappeared in a twinkling, like the shattered pieces themselves. Across the river of champagne, the sad gentlemen in white tunics all cringed at the magic of it, before turning away, still muttering their prayers. 

Merikus would never have understood the transformative power of their faith, that these Vaccarrians were using it to do the hard work of adapting to their own impossible circumstances. In this case, it had nothing to do with the loneliness of migration, or the crushing burden of poverty. In this case, prayers gave quiet, peaceful men a sense of stability in the face of an other-worldly miracle. For of course it was one thing to have all the money and power on 892-IV, like Merik; or be lucky enough to get a mission on a starship, like Kirk. But it was quite another to be responsible for a family of both old and young, on a world where it seemed you couldn’t win. Here, all the vicious imponderables outstripped their own credulity, in the worry of the night. In their prayers, they believed the next generation could afford not to pray.

“They could be anywhere,” James T. Kirk sighed, looking for signs of further disruption. The working crowd backstage bundled back and forth, where lines of trucks and vans were being unloaded. Musicians were showing off to one another behind another huge backdrop, or imitating their fathers or mentors with drums and horns and stringed instruments; to the sound of a haunting whir of carved wooden pieces, spun in the air in circles.

The women folk dancers, in their white gowns and hats, had gone up to begin their ceremonial poses and swoops and dives on stage. Backstage, a guy pushed a large shovel uphill, along the path, to gather up the broken glass. And Mr. Spock was looking to the sky with a furrowed brow.

Another blast of the horn came from offshore, and there was the sound of chanting. It was very hard to differentiate one crowd’s noise from everything else, but it was there, in the distance, back by the wheel. 

“This should prove awkward,” the science officer sighed. But he was looking up to the sky, and not the yacht, raising the scanner to capture something high above the darkening east horizon.

Kirk looked around, and then up. All of a sudden, at least to anyone else on the surface, the sky rippled, clouds and haze and all, for a very brief instant, forming into great widening circles— almost like one’s imagination— where a tiny black void opened up overhead, in the middle of the heavens. Then it was gone, and the ripples vanished as well.

“The first shuttlecraft,” Kirk nodded. They were testing the new warp equations in orbit, using the small engines on the starship’s little exploratory vessels, one by one.

“Yes,” Spock said, bemused. “The other two are approximately there, and there,” he said, pointing to the blue above.

“Thank goodness it didn’t blow up,” Kirk said, not seeming terribly reassured.

“The effect should be primarily visual, if it had. The other two shuttles are likewise unmanned. But all three contain the navigator’s new engine programming,” Spock explained. “The second, with my additional modifications, and Mr. Scott’s variations programmed into the third.”

“So far, so good,” the captain said, looking around the park again. Some were looking up, while others were pointing, though many had missed the event entirely. Kirk thought to himself, we might get out of this before midnight. Which would still be too late, if Starfleet went ahead with its plan.

Helicopters created a distant clattering rhythm, hovering above the shoreline, their red lights flashing. Much closer to Kirk and Spock, another troupe of dancers was brought up on stage to replace the women in white. Soon those more colorful performers were pulsing and stomping and writhing to a very different beat. Shrieks of excitement came from the crowd in front of the stage. The musicians were drumming and whirling and jamming. The revels had truly begun.

Off in the dimming light, under the Ferris wheel, the other crowd was growing along the water’s edge. The lights of the great carnival ride began to glitter above, as the sun had set, and the wheel pulsed like an electrical leviathan coming inexorably ashore.

It took twice as long to get out, but Kirk and Spock threaded their way through the crowd, to the east. By the time they got there, the Vulcan warned, it would be time for the next stage of the experiment.

The captain had the feeling that there’d been another green phaser burst off to the north, slightly, up one of those tall buildings. But there was too much going on, too many flashes of images, too much jerking around to stay aware, and not to step on some children dashing around, playing in the dark, in the grass. As they squeezed through, Mr. Spock was reading the scanner, and pointing it up to the sky every ten seconds. 

The two men tended slightly to the north, which seemed less packed, to track any sign of the lone surviving security officer, where they might have seen the flash. There was a lucky break, in a way, because it also put Kirk and Spock up a gentle hill, above the oceanfront. They could see over the whole crowd, down to the harbor, and also farther north to a little tunnel under a highway, as soft natural light gave way to the glare of the artificial.

There were now clearly two different crowds, the families and couples closer to the big stage, and the younger people gathering at the water’s edge, at the dark abstraction of the sea. In that direction was the ghostly upward thrust of expensive yachts, and out beyond that, the great flat barges bearing the evening’s fireworks. 

“See anything?” Kirk asked, as Spock looked up again.

“The next test isn’t for another seven minutes and forty-three seconds,” the Vulcan sighed, without looking down. “And the first launch is already hundreds of millions of miles away now, if it still exists. Readings from the Enterprise are inconclusive. In any case, we shall learn more from all three launches, collectively, than from the fate of any one individual experiment.”

“And the next one is yours,” Kirk nodded. The Vulcan seemed to sigh, as if he lacked confidence.

Of course Spock hadn’t laid down any vicci on his own warp equations. But he almost seemed to be hedging his bets. The first launch hadn’t blown to bits, and now the gauntlet had been thrown down by the young Lt. Sulu. There was almost no point in proceeding with other experiments, except for deference to her elders.

“The first one represents the predictive work of the astrogation section; this next, of the science department as a whole; and the third, of engineering.” His eyebrow rose a tic, as he finally looked in Kirk’s direction. “There is no ‘competition,’ in the human sense of the word.”

Kirk nodded, but it went kind of sideways, into a half-grin, over Spock’s faintly scandalized expression. Kirk certainly didn’t have a ‘logical’ explanation for his friend’s constant monitoring of the sky. Then the captain laid a finger on the first officer’s elbow and they descended eastward, toward the water.

There was a sense of abandon in the air, after the crowd had had its first or second drink of spirits, while spotlights shot overhead like phaser beams, toward the delirious dancers and acrobats and clowns onstage, from up on towers. A kind of relaxation, and sense of enticement, filled the audience facing west.

With the sudden death of Ensign Rogers, the other three women became more careful. Eskandar took aim only at Sona, leaving Taleel darting ahead to look for signs of Absalom. The new queen of Scalos gave up on breakable obstacles, but zig-zagged through the crowd, making phaser fire almost impossible. Except for that one single moment of exposure, when Eskandar had a shot lined-up almost perfectly, based on Sona’s apparent trajectory across a row of trees, below a great building. The skyscraper looked like a gargantuan white Roman column, and the stun blast eventually sent a bright splash of light up its ridges and curves, like perfectly spaced folds in a robe: as if she had stabbed some Vulcan Caesar, and the green stain clung to it.

The pattern of lights radiating out from the center of the Ferris wheel was frozen, incomplete, caught between one previous geometric illumination and the next, and the instant dragged by as the women disentangled themselves from the crowds at dusk. There would be shouting and speeches and declarations when they got to the water’s edge, with recriminations at the foot of a new god, and only each other to blame.

Taleel didn’t expect to be crying as she ran out to the pier, dodging around the frozen mobs. But something about the impossibility and urgency of finding him overwhelmed her, knowing the end of her love was in sight. She felt incredibly stupid, certain that Absalom was so brilliant, and that she couldn’t save him from it. Then she was crying for rage, at his utter stupidity, and for sadness, and how obvious all his flaws had been. And then she ran out of the last of the pier.

She looked up and saw a small black hole in the dim sky, overhead, that she’d certainly never seen before. In that long moment, the heavens became like the back of her neck, as seen in some large mirror. She was fixated for the longest time on the comparative malevolence of that strange dark spot, from where she stood at the far end of the ribbon of boardwalk, looking up. Tears from moments ago streaked down her cheeks, as she gazed up, and found it hard to breathe. If anyone could have caught that impossibly narrow slice of a nano-second from above, it would look as if she’d been praying in anguish: beseeching something that could not, or would not exist.

A perfect circle of light and shadow appeared around the blackness like a halo, which would slowly spread, allowing for more ripples to radiate out in their turn. Even the long, feathery clouds billowed and bowed, once the first undulations had gone halfway across the sky. If it came with a sound, it hadn’t arrived yet. She imagined a remorseless “bloop!” like someone pulling the plug in a bathtub, as all the water ran down the drain.


	21. Chapter 21

“Go, go, go!” Sona was shouting, from the other end of the pier, stopping for one incredibly dangerous moment, though Taleel could not see Eskandar through the thousands of others silhouetted on shore. The sky was draining away, and nobody seemed to notice. The queen of Scalos ran north, and the ensign from the Enterprise emerged from the frozen legion in flat-out pursuit.

Taleel climbed down thick wooden rungs that formed a ladder, nailed into a corner of the last of the pier, and a small police boat sat below in mid-bob. There were no oars on board, and the engine would take forever, so she climbed back up and did some more looking around. Then, a few minutes later (in relative terms) she did manage to score a pair of ornamental-looking paddles by breaking a window in a tourist shop by the big wheel. The ocean churned thick like jelly, as she heaved the boat to sea.

She told the humans she’d chosen this world, but she wasn’t so sure anymore. It was almost not her world at all, at this speed. The accumulated sigh of the waves came in layers across the water: high and hypnotic at one moment, and low and terrible the next. The boat seemed to be going faster, toward a yacht ahead, but the water barely moved. Her world had never been allowed the corrupting pleasure of a Salvador Dali, so there could be no artistic charm in it. Her heart wailed, and the sea along with it.

The ripples in the sky engulfed the hemisphere, by the time she reached the vessel. After a few tries, she managed to throw a line up, and then lower the lead end of it, to tie a loop back upon itself. She crawled up on board. The great coiled weight of the rope below seemed destined to anchor the boat alongside. She was in a strange dreamscape, under an impossible sky, and wishing not to want the man within.

Mercifully, he was asleep; or dead, she didn’t know which would be better. He belonged to her, so she laid down with him on the fancy bed in a dark cabin. When she woke up, if she woke up, everything would be back to normal, she insisted.

He had the oddest sensation that Taleel had been beside him, when he awoke. But she vanished like a dream when he turned around to look. Old Senator Vindicus laughed like an ayekka when Absalom told him of his plan, to sweep into harbor in the senator’s yacht, and present himself to the masses as their savior. But, then again, Vindicus laughed like an ayekka at almost anything these days.

There was a lovely silk robe in the cabin closet. After some experimentation he wore that, yellow and red striped, like a figure of old, and cinched at the waist. Everyone would get the joke, would get that he was just spoofing the Old Order, which now masqueraded as a new order. It would merely be an ‘attention-getter,’ and something to make a statement in the papers the next day.

But part of him wished they wouldn’t. Wouldn’t treat it as… a joke. There was something missing from the new days on the calendar, a sense of forward movement. The soul stretched forward, for a kind of perfection, or paradise, through the full length of life. Instead, people were getting smaller, and fitting more neatly inside the box of each new day, and didn’t understand why: why each little confrontation in traffic, or at the store, could become the epic story of their lives, from moment to moment. There was no greater story than that. They were animals all over again, scrambling for food in a shrinking cage.

He leaned out of the cabin and spoke with the steward, who hurried up to stern to ask the pilot to bring the yacht into harbor, with another blast of the horn. And then Absalom went back into the bedroom, to watch through the portals, as the land loomed closer. The people began to seem familiar, massed along the shore, in the sunset. Young, his age, teens and twenties.

He realized he’d need to be posed dramatically out front, on the prow, like a visionary, like a painting. It was getting too dark, but he went into the night air, police helicopters high overhead all over again, and the pounding music from the stage across the park. Music bounced off the legion of buildings, looming against him, their windows lit up like the banked fires of worldly riches, as the yacht made its approach.

He stood there, at the forward point of the ship, with one foot up on the rail. Absalom leaned forward, and the breeze kicked up his golden locks. He had to admit, it was fairly epic.

And the next thing he knew, he was shoved overboard, by a pair of unseen hands. Over he went, and down, twenty-five feet, hitting the black water below. He went under, and kicked around. Finally, he bobbed back up to the surface, spewing a stream of water, and splashing randomly as the long, elegant boat continued along without him. He noticed a little skiff with a police insignia hooked up alongside, and caught up with it, to climb in. It was being towed along with the yacht, so he really hadn’t lost much time, falling inexplicably into the drink.

He tried shouting up to the upper decks, but the noise from the the revels was the only substance in the air anymore. And then! The little boat was being left behind. The rope had come undone, and he was lost at sea. Barely a hundred feet out, but out at sea nonetheless. The wide, flaring stern of the yacht taunted him as it went away.

He looked like a madman, hair plastered down to his head; the robe dripping from his arms, when he stood in the dinghy. The sound of chopper blades carried harsh across the water. He felt disappointed, reckless, and ridiculous all at once. Surely they wouldn’t have murdered him twice. 

And he was alone in the dark, at sea. Not even “on his world,” in the literal sense of the word. He picked up the oars rowed to land.

“You have a vision for lunch, when what you need is a vision for life,” Taleel had admonished him, once, or at least once. He looked around to see if she were magically behind him again. A little boat, alone, is a strangely humbling thing.

The lights of the Ferris wheel reflected in the water, and the loud, distant music echoed as he paddled in. Did he still want to be the savior of the planet, the man returned from the dead, the object of glory and worship? You bet he did.

If he did, he’d make quick work of all those Old Order fools, lingering too long in life, holding up the march of justice and mercy and the reparation of old wrongs. There was indeed a legitimate need for a god in this world, he reasoned, as the little boat went bobbing. Still, circumstance mocked his aspirations.

“Gods, give me a sign,” he said wearily to himself, unable to come to a conclusion on his own, and barely speaking at all. In the comparative silence that followed, he had just begun to develop a tinge of regret. But it was too late to take it back.

A brilliant smear of light was unleashed in the heavens, the kind you start to look up at, and then shrink back from, in terror. Before the boat had moved any farther, he felt it had grown much closer to the bigger ships moored nearby, in an immeasurable flash. The distance had not changed. But everything seemed foreshortened in an instant, collapsing together into something very small and dense around him.

When things made sense again, visually, the people on shore were assuming nonsensical poses of wonder and beseeching: crouching low, with arms held up like naked rafters to a storm. Absalom had landed in the water again, though the boat had somehow been thrown between two larger ships, tied up at dock: their masts dueling overhead in the strange light, bobbing left and right, together and apart, with creaks and clunks in the sudden roaring wind. In the reeling concatenation of the sail posts, and the tilting of the ships, he had been spared the worst, though the boats seemed to want to crush him beneath the waves. Farther inland, on the hotels and communications office buildings and insurance towers, the windows had all burst at once, across the park.

“If you’re going to make an entrance, make it now,” he muttered, climbing up from the water, grasping at the planks of the pier. 

“Well, that’s probably inevitable,” Kirk sighed, as Mr. Spock gave up on trying to fix his scanner, after the blast that ended the second warp experiment, when none of their devices seemed to work. Left to his own calculations, the science officer seemed lost in thought. His own experiment seemed to have gone completely wrong, out in orbit. And it should not have. He would have to reconsider his entire equation, as the ocean view lay shattered in confusion all around. It was dark again, and in spite of the momentary horror of the crowds, Kirk imagined he could see the holographic equations floating in front of Spock’s eyes, comparing Lt. Sulu’s to his own. People were hurrying away, back to the shelter of the city.

The two commanders hid in an underpass, below a car ramp, during the blast: covering others with their bodies, as if it could save an entire planet; suffering the shock, like being thrown down against the clanging deck of a starship. And now they walked in silence, looking for any sign of Kirk’s offspring. The crowd was dispersing. The lights and the stage had gone dark, like a purgatory of wanderers, shadows against shadow, sadly leaving the scene. Many a picnic blanket still lay on the ground, abandoned.

They began walking the waterfront, for something like the tenth time for Kirk that day. Though now it was dark, and no power at all. A few emergency sirens could be heard in the distance.

“It would be nice if the third one was farther away, just in case,” Kirk said, of the final miniature warp launch, listening to the chorus of emergency sirens.

“Yes. However, it would also interfere with the ‘controls’ on the other two launches,” Spock said, very quietly, adding that to the list of worries. “The final equations would lack comparative value.”

Someone was shouting off in the distance, over and over. Jim Kirk first assumed it was a raving street person, for he had once again been reminded that people, like gods, would push away anything unclean or unwell. The two men from the Enterprise turned and followed the lone shouting. There was a crashed helicopter on top of one of the boats, and probably others, scattered up and down the water’s edge. The sirens grew closer, as the two commanders trudged the wrong way, laterally across departing crowds.

The chase had left both women exhausted: every little feint, every near capture, every sudden escape, up and down the length of the capital. Now they were back at the wheel, the lights radiating anti-shadows of blue and green and red. 

The second shuttle was just now exploding high above in space, and the flash of new light spread without ripples. It was the Big Bang and Judgment Day all rolled up into one. Sona and Eskandar stared, panting.

“You’re under arrest,” the security officer gasped, in spite of herself.

“Go to hell,” Sona threw back. She plunged forward into running again, on the all-consuming light that absorbed the pavement, along an ocean of that was now just glowing energy. Everything was energy, pure and released and irrevocable in that long moment, and whatever survived would be a remnant. The boats in harbor were motionless light as well. But farther along the way, Sona could spot Taleel, searching the rows, hurrying up and down the ranks of vessels, lost in the blinding sails and staves.

Taleel jumped into the water, and grew wedged against the dock by a large wooden boat. Sona was lying on the jetty, trying to reach down for her. The side of the boat was pure light, with a shark blue undertone, against mercuric waves.

Eskandar plunged into the fluid light, past Sona, to push at the boat that crushed upon the Vaccarrian. Then they could also see Absalom’s form in the water, down in the tiny space of air separating the boats. He was disappearing in the light below. Taleel was trapped shoving one little vessel, and then the other, like Eskandar, to make a tilting space for him between.

“What would you do,” Eskandar was shouting now, over the deadly hiss of the light, “if you had absolute freedom? What would you do?” It was odd, odder than the moment itself.

Taleel’s eyes went wide, the question seemed ridiculous. But it was by the book: a ‘prompt,’ a diagnostic question they teach you in Starfleet. If you think you’ve violated the Prime Directive, you can just ask the native, the planet-bound victim of your foolish interference wherever you happened to be visiting, if they still have a concept of their own freedom, of their own self-determination: “What would you do, if you had absolute freedom?” the professors would ask every semester. And the cadets would always laugh and say “pass this course.”

“Save him,” she gasped, “and preserve him, and tell him he’s not a fool,” Taleel thrashed around, for she too was wedged in, and guaranteed cellular damage, caught between the ships of light.

“Take this,” Eskandar shouted, above the hiss. Her one hand was still up, and shoving the other boat, while her other hand dove down inside her tunic, blazing in the light. A little bottle, like the first one, came out. She flung it at Taleel. It rattled across the glowing hull of the boat behind her, as the ensign turned. They were shoving with all their might, as the shockwave began to materialize overhead: a gray oblong sphere, full of gnarls and fists. All the boats were tilting now.

The little bottle rattled this way and that, across the top of the deck, then dropped off in the inescapable glow, down to the water. Both women were rolling up like balls in the blinding sky, between the crushing hulls. The little bottle bobbed back into sight. Sona was overhead, rocking as hard as she could, while Eskandar was shouting.

“Take it!” 

The boat was suffocating her, so in that sense Taleel knew she had succeeded in saving Absalom again. She caught the bottle, as it dropped down toward the watery light. The top popped off in her hand, and she drank it, and the boat rolled back away again. 

It wasn’t blue and glowing any longer, it was dark and polished and smooth like mahogany. The stillness had an entirely different quality to it, measured by the familiar, and the level of reality already engraved in her heart. 

She looked and saw Absalom, who jerked in the water, like a newborn fish, when the boats had cleaved again, the thunder receding. A motionless old woman’s body floated between them, before sinking, and vanishing from sight.

“I am risen! I am risen!” a familiar young voice insisted, on a dock, between the rows of boats, the farthest capsized in the water by the blast, others farther in bumping and squealing quietly against their tie-offs in the night. 

“No, you’re not,” Kirk shook his head, though only Spock could hear, before they got down to the moorings. For he had been refracted, himself, into a dozen, or a hundred, new parts. And some of them were purple and grand and breathtakingly absurd.

“I can still do it,” Absalom reassured his father, as Kirk approached. Mr. Spock kept a respectful distance at the land’s edge. Taleel stood far out over the green water, where they’d emerged, both of them sloshing wet. Father and son appraised one another, and she was glad to be invisible for another minute or two.

“That’s fine, and how would you make it work,” the older man nodded, slowly coming close, but not too close. Absalom lowered his head, and his jaws seemed to tear at some invisible bone or tendon, growing tight. Everyone was assassinating one another so quickly now, that dreams and visions were becoming obsolete.

“I’ll tell them who I really am,” the young man roared, pointing down at the space between them, his eyes ablaze. “That I am not the son of Merikus, but the son of Kirk.” It sounded more like an accusation, than a grand pronouncement.

The father nodded again, looking down, over all the trouble he had caused. Looking down because he had come back too soon, or too late, or come back at all. 

“I need your help,” the son beseeched, quietly, in the dark. Taleel held still beyond them, at the edge of the pier. Kirk could stay, and make it work, but it was not the most stable or selfless arrangement imaginable. He was being forced into a position of power, or “power behind the throne,” which seemed equally distasteful. There had to be a dozen other answers, to making this work, to getting on with life as it must naturally unfold.

“I will be the god of this planet,” Absalom snarled impressively, after reading Kirk’s emotions, even in the dark. The starship captain nodded and turned to go. The boards creaked softly under his boots as he passed Mr. Spock, toward the shattered city.

Then an unseen pair of hands shoved Absalom again, and the boy went flying off the edge of the little pier, plunging sideways, between the boats. The splash made Jim Kirk turn around, and Taleel stepped forward, just an inch. 

“Sona?” he said. But he felt a stab of pain, that he’d never see her again. He didn’t know why, perhaps it was the equation in his own mind, substituting ‘goodbye' for an unknown variable of pain. Absalom gurgled and splashed and cursed, unseen, slapping the boards and dragging himself out of the water again, reenacting the troublesome crawl of evolution. Taleel only watched, insisting on being ignored, as his punishment.

“We must get under cover soon,” the Vulcan said, in the form of a polite reminder as Kirk walked by. Two old men looking for shelter, after all the years of grandeur. Everything else was dark and silent.

The park grounds were swept by continual, revolving police lights, from the cars that pulled up on the grass in little groups here and there. And even they were leaving too, since the revelers had fled.

“You’ll have to leave, gentlemen,” a cop in a helmet said, not abrasively, when he looked up to see them go by.

“Yes, officer,” the childless father nodded.

“Oh,” Spock said, as they trudged across the grass. He lifted his scanner, to find it had rebooted on its own, very nicely. 

“You fixed it,” Kirk observed, encouragingly.

“It fixed itself,” Spock corrected, sounding pleasantly surprised; peering into it, and lifting it back up toward the grid of the sky.

Absalom was shouting in the distance, and being dragged away by the cops, and Taleel, with much less struggle. They lowered them both into the back of a patrol car. But then the arresting officers were both knocked down, inexplicably to the grass, in the dark. The car doors slammed, and the engine roared to life. 

The police car sped away by itself, lights ablaze; with the son of Merikus, and the girl, in back.


	22. Chapter 22

“And it is our further decree,” Revolo said, in a white marble room, with lots of gold trim everywhere, “that the brothers should be reunited, to rule as one.” 

His long red cape, which had seemed to be arranged on the polished marble floor at his left just a moment ago, now lay as a royal river behind him, to his right. It was like a graduation cap’s tassel, magically switched from one side to another, as when one collects a diploma. 

Such sudden reversals were becoming common now, and neither brother paid it any mind, as the video cameras took the scene in. The young ceremonial leader beckoned to Absalom, and fitted him with a matching silver necklace, a ‘pectoral,’ as the ancient Egyptians would have had it. The rebel son was seated alongside the over-conforming one, in a matching chair.

Captain James T. Kirk watched it all from high up in orbit, in the center seat on the bridge of the USS Enterprise. Just as Drusilla, looking bright-eyed and even gracious, looked on, down in the royal chamber, seated behind her two sons. Taleel could not be seen in the moment, but had been visible earlier, in the broadcast that aired across 892-IV.

“Well, Jim,” McCoy nodded ruefully, “they may never join the Federation. But at least they’re not headed down the same dark road as Earth, back in those days.”

“It’ll be interesting to see,” Kirk nodded. “With a computer expert on the inside, at the outset, who doesn’t think like a greedy old man.”

“Taleel, the girl,” Spock said, remembering.

“And all my sons?” Kirk smiled.

“The rebel Gideonites will be remanded to Starfleet Academy,” McCoy instantly decreed, with a gentle high-handedness, “where they will learn never to romance strange alien women on all the new worlds.”

“There are worse things than that, Bones,” Kirk objected, still smiling. But then he felt a coldness in his chest. “And Amar, who suffered heroism all on his own.”

“And Rogers, and Eskandar,” Spock said, of the security team. Amar would be buried at space— the Gideonite in orbit over Gideon, the security officers, suddenly infinitely old and gone, and Friedman, his body recovered after plunging to his death. Each would rest on their own home world. 

The captain nodded, over the final sacrifices, as Taleel had recounted them. 

“Absolute freedom,” Kirk sighed, remembering the academy test, to determine the degree of contamination. As long as people could still conceive of an absolute freedom, they had not been permanently damaged by an unexpected infraction of the Prime Directive. And life could go on, in spite of everything.

“Can there ever really be such a thing?” Spock blinked, dismissively, of absolutes and freedoms, merged together as one. He seemed to be imagining something as cataclysmic as matter, smashed together with anti-matter, in the leap between the stars.

“Can there be anything at all, Mr. Spock, without the chance of it?” McCoy shot back, pleased at the reversal.

“Navigator,” Kirk said now, of Lt. Sulu. “Are we ready to attempt your equations?”

“Yes sir,” she nodded, though of course these were finally merged together what they had all learned from the second experimental launch, and a third, of Mr. Scott’s, that went smoothly.

“Lay in a course for the nearest Starbase,” he said, as the ship’s engines began their familiar drone to life.

“Course laid in, and going to maximum orbit. Then warp factor three.”

The planet, and its two bright moons, seemed to fly away on the viewscreen. And then the twin warp engines thrummed up through their own profound musical scale. With a great burst, the ship was sailing across its own infinite length: toward some infinitely massive object up ahead, at an impossible kind of speed. The ship was not spread across the entire length of this knowable space; nor the mass ahead ever really infinite, inside this very universe. But it seemed so, as long as she went on and on.

# #


End file.
